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Firefighting aircraft directory/Canada/Lockheed L-188 Electra/C-FBAQ

Aircraft reference

C-FBAQ

Lockheed L-188 Electra airtanker · Government of the Northwest Territories / Buffalo Airways

Air tankersCanada
Photograph of C-FBAQ

CambridgeBayWeather · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Identity

Mission
Air tankers
Registration
C-FBAQ
Mode-S address
C002B5
ICAO type
L188
Model
Lockheed L-188 Electra airtanker
Manufacturer
Lockheed
Serial number
1039
Operator
Government of the Northwest Territories / Buffalo Airways
Country of registration
Canada

About the Lockheed L-188 Electra

Land-based air tanker

It loads water or retardant on the ground and attacks from a runway base. It can knock down flames with water or lay a retardant line ahead of the fire to slow its spread and support crews on the ground.

What this type can do

The four-engine L-188 Electra carries a large retardant load at high transit speed. Buffalo Airways’ converted tankers reload on the ground and lay long lines for sustained attack, complementing smaller initial-attack aircraft and amphibious scoopers.

This describes the type’s usual firefighting capability; it does not prove what this aircraft is carrying or doing now.

Lockheed L-188 Electra

The Lockheed L-188 Electra is an American turboprop airliner built by Lockheed. First flown in 1957, it was the first large turboprop airliner built in the United States. With its fairly high power-to-weight ratio, huge propellers and very short wings resulting in the majority of the wingspan being enveloped in propwash, large Fowler flaps which significantly increased effective wing area when extended, and four-engined design, the airplane had airfield performance capabilities unmatched by many jet transport aircraft even today—particularly on short runways and high altitude airfields. Initial sales were good, but after two fatal crashes that led to expensive modifications to fix a design defect, no more were ordered. Jet airliners soon supplanted turboprops for many purposes, and many Electras were modified as freighters. Some Electras are still being used in various roles into the 21st century. The airframe was also used as the basis for the Lockheed P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft.

ICAO type · L188

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Flight history

Every sortie this server has recorded, reconstructed from the positions the volunteer ADS-B network heard. Select a row to isolate it on the map.

Reading the archive…

Photographs

Freely licensed images are stored with this project; the rest are shown from the site that publishes them.

  • Photograph of the aircraft

    Rogerman747 · All rights reserved · Planespotters.net

Elsewhere

Live tracking & flight history

  • Flightradar24Commercial flight history, airport pairs and scheduled times.
  • ADS-B ExchangeUnfiltered live globe, including aircraft other trackers hide.
  • adsb.lolThe volunteer network this map reads its trajectories from.
  • FlightAwareRegistration record and recent activity.

Photography

  • JetPhotosScreened spotter photography, newest first.
  • Planespotters.netPhotographs alongside the production and delivery record.
  • Airliners.netLong-running photo archive, often the oldest images of a frame.
  • Wikimedia CommonsFreely licensed images — the ones this sheet is allowed to host.

Registries & airframe records

  • Airframes.orgAirframe history: serial number, operators, incidents.
  • adsbdbOpen registration database, in JSON.
  • hexdb.ioMode-S address record used by the tracking community, in JSON.

Type reference

  • ICAO type L188ICAO Doc 8643 entry: designator, wake category, engines.
Reference data assembled on August 14, 2026 from adsbdb, hexdb.io, Transport Canada CCAR, Wikimedia Commons, Planespotters. Run pnpm fetch:aircraft --refresh to rebuild it.