Once again, I'm going to talk about a Russian aircraft and I know informations a often hard to find.
It seems Beriev Be-200 are strongly used in western Europe to fight against fire (Greece,Spain...) and I wonder why these countries which need them more and more years after years don't buy some of them (even USA) as Canadairs are now old.
I also wonder why this aircraft has no sale as a passenger aircraft as it's avaible in passenger configuration. A few years ago, they wanted to create a new airline to link islands in Greece with a passenger Be-200 but I'm still waiting.....

While it's a great aircraft, I think the amphibious plane is largely (but not completely) dead in the West. Add to this a slight mistrust of Russian technology and you have the answer, unfortunately.

Hi!

Portugal "Protecção Civil" is using during this season two BE-200's to fight the fires that - Thank God- are very few this year. The airplanes involved are; RA-21516 and RA-21517! They are doing a nice work over here but it's been a fairly calm season...very sad to see that in Greece things are going very bad! I hope our friends from Greece recover from that in a good way...I understand that very well, in Portugal 2003, 2004 and 2005 were bad years to our countries!
Regards

Does someone know how many of them have been built and how many are in active service?