N403DF

N403DF is an Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Boss, a single-engine turboprop operated by USDA FOREST SERVICE FEPP, CALIFORNIA DEPT FORESTRY & FIRE PROTEC. SkyMeter has tracked 292 flights totalling 271 hours of airtime via ADS-B across 2 callsigns. The most frequent segment is KSTS to KSTS. Service window in our records spans 436 days. Of those flights, 22 (7.5%) carry at least one detected incident: a go-around, unstable approach, stall warning, or runway excursion. The Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Boss has a maximum takeoff weight of 16,000 lb, light wake category.

About the Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Boss

The Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Boss is a purpose-built aerial firefighting aircraft that can scoop water from lakes, rivers, and coastal waters while in flight, a capability shared by only a handful of aircraft types worldwide. Developed by Air Tractor in the early 2000s as an amphibious variant of their proven agricultural AT-802, the Fire Boss mounts Wipaire amphibious floats and can skim across a water surface at 70-80 knots, filling its 800-gallon tank in approximately 12 seconds without landing. This rapid-reload capability allows it to make repeated drops on wildfires far more quickly than land-based tankers that must return to an airport for refilling.

Powered by a Pratt & Whitney PT6A-67F turboprop producing 1,600 shaft horsepower, the Fire Boss combines rugged agricultural-aircraft DNA with specialized firefighting systems. It can operate from remote lakes and reservoirs inaccessible to larger air tankers, making it especially valuable in the mountainous terrain of the western United States and Canada. The type has proven particularly effective on initial attack missions, where speed of response matters more than total retardant capacity.

While it lacks the 3,000-gallon payload of heavy air tankers, its ability to reload without returning to base allows a single Fire Boss to deliver comparable total volume over the course of a day's operations. SkyMeter has tracked flights across airframes and operators, with the largest observed operator.