Back to the map
🇺🇸
Firefighting aircraft directory/France/Airbus A400M Atlas/F-RBAX

Aircraft reference

F-RBAX

Airbus A400M Atlas · French Air and Space Force

Air tankersFranceBlade 38
Representative photograph of the Airbus A400M Atlas

Representative type photograph. No verified publishable photograph of F-RBAX was found.

Peng Chen · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Identity

Mission
Air tankers
Registration
F-RBAX
Mode-S address
3B775C
ICAO type
A400
Model
Airbus A400M Atlas
Manufacturer
Airbus Defence and Space
Serial number
137
First flight
2024-02-27
Operator
French Air and Space Force
Country of registration
France
Home base
Orléans-Bricy · France
Call sign
Blade 38

A400M fitted with the 20 t roll-on/roll-off retardant kit; this airframe made the type’s first operational retardant drop over Gironde on 25 July 2026.

About the Airbus A400M Atlas

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

When fitted with its removable roll-on/roll-off kit, the A400M can discharge up to 20,000 litres of water or retardant in one pass. Its strength is a very large, long line from a ground-refilled transport aircraft, not rapid scooping rotations.

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

The Airbus A400M Atlas is a European four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft. It was designed by Airbus Military, now Airbus Defence and Space, as a tactical airlifter with strategic capabilities to replace older transport aircraft such as the Transall C-160 and the Lockheed C-130 Hercules.

ICAO type · A400

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.

No freely licensed photograph of this airframe was found. The photography links below reach the databases that hold spotter images of it.

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 A400ICAO Doc 8643 entry: designator, wake category, engines.
Reference data assembled on July 27, 2026 from hexdb.io, Flightradar24, Aeroweb, Planespotters, French Ministry of the Interior. Run pnpm fetch:aircraft --refresh to rebuild it.