On the morning of Friday, August 8, a film of ash covered the wing of a Beechcraft plane parked at the Garons air base in the south of France. Sylvain Magnien, who has been flying with the aircraft since 2020 to map fires, told Le Monde, “that single detail says everything about the extraordinary nature of the Aude fire. Normally, you don’t get ash at altitude.” On Tuesday, August 5, the first day of the disaster, he mapped, as early as 5 pm, the perimeter of the monster blaze that swept through 17,000 hectares in 72 hours and devastated the Corbières region.
“My job is to measure fires from the sky, calculate their speed, and list the villages or homes at risk,” he said, so that within 30 minutes, firefighters on the ground can devise their strategy. In this case, the observation plane had to stay airborne much longer, facing a highly unpredictable fire – moving at 5 km/h, which is extremely fast – and capable of projecting embers up to 500 meters, sparking multiple new fires.
As Sylvain Magnien was finishing his initial mapping, Jean-Marc Mateo, a Canadair pilot, took off from the same base to reinforce an initial rotation of water bombers and retardant aircraft – the red liquid that slows the fire’s progress by altering how vegetation burns.
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