Black Hawk downed by new helicopter

The twin-engined UH-60 is to be replaced by the V-280 helicopter built by Bell, beating a joint rival bid by Sikorsky and Boeing.

A UH-60 US Army Black Hawk helicopter takes part in the military exercise Talisman Sabre 2019 at Queensland’s Shoalwater Bay Training Area.

The Black Hawk helicopter, which featured in one of the US army’s most disastrous counter-insurgency operations, in Somalia nearly 30 years ago, is to be replaced in a multibillion-dollar program awarded this week.

Nineteen members of the US special forces died after two of the helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu in 1993, as depicted in the film Black Hawk Down.

The twin-engined UH-60 Black Hawk, built by Sikorsky, has been one of the army’s main troop-carrying helicopters, in use since the 1970s.

It served extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan and, alongside the twin-rotor Chinook, carried the special forces teams who killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.

Now it is to be replaced by the V-280 helicopter built by Bell, beating a joint rival bid by Sikorsky and Boeing.

Bell has been awarded an initial contract worth $US232m ($346m) to develop the aircraft, which will be a tilt-rotor helicopter, similar to the V-22 Osprey already in service. The tilt-rotor system allows the helicopter to fly at speeds equivalent to a fixed-wing aircraft. A prototype is due by 2025.

Once foreign buyers are factored in, the project could earn $US70bn for Bell, which is owned by Textron, based in Fort Worth, Texas.

The Black Hawk was modified for an array of US military and official roles as well as being sold to several countries.

The VH-60N is designated Marine One when carrying the US president.

During the incident in Somalia, two helicopters packed with special forces soldiers were hit by rocket-propelled grenades fired by militia forces under the command of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

The plan had been to snatch two of Aidid’s senior lieutenants from a stronghold in Mogadishu, involving about 160 American troops. Instead, the helicopters were shot down and the dead soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

Hundreds of Somalis were killed in the ensuing battle, which lasted two days.

Special forces-adapted Black Hawks, known as MH-60s, were used during the mission to kill Bin Laden.

One of the helicopters crashed when trying to land in the compound where the al-Qa’ida leader was living, but there were no American casualties and Seal Team Six commandos were able to evacuate on other aircraft after completing their mission.

The US State Department in August approved the sale of 40 Black Hawks to Australia for $2.8bn, to replace the Australian Defence Forces’s trouble-prone MRH-90 Taipans as the army’s workhorse helicopter.

Australia bought 47 of the Taipans as a replacement for the Black Hawk and Sea King helicopter fleets, but the multi-billion-dollar Howard govern-ment-era acquisition has been listed as a “project of concern” since 2011.

The entire fleet was grounded in 2019 amid serious concerns about the tail rotor blades, and 27 aircraft were grounded last year to fix cabin sliding door rails.

THE TIMES