Sikorsky Black Hawk UH-60M Swedish Air Force 161226 flying display RAF Fairford RIAT 2025 AirShow

They had its combat practice with the U.S. Army as far back as the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. They were used in the invasion. They were deployed in their hundreds to the Gulf in 1990 and conducted many airborne assaults in the ground phase of 1991's Operation Desert Storm and therefore contributed to the overhead over pretty much the past 30 years. Black Hawks have been there notably in Somalia, Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq again and they've always been stationed in large numbers with the U.S. Army in Germany. This is the UH-60M model, a major upgrade with more efficient rotor blades, new avionics, infrared suppressors, more powerful General Electric T-701 engines. First deliveries of these were in 2006. And this is, as I say, from the Swedish Air Force which initially bought the Black Hawk as an interim measure in 2012 while Sweden waited for its NH90s. All 15 of the Black Hawks were delivered in just 16 months. The procurement became permanent. Straight away they were deployed by the Swedes to Afghanistan for medical evacuation tasks. This particular variant is denoted as the HKP-16. It took me a while to work out why it was called that until I realized it was the consonants of the word helicopter in the Swedish spelling of the word. There are various different HKPs in this Bambi bucket and the Swedes often use them also, or they can use them, to airlift the civil police if they're required to deploy in numbers to a particular seat. They've recently added extra fuel tankers to increase the range of the helicopter ordering another dozen Black Hawks as part of the general strengthening of its military capabilities. So with over 5,000 produced, there's a number of other derivatives of the UH-60 Black Hawk and they include the HH-60, known as the PayPal, which is optimized for combat search and rescue, a specialist role in itself, the FH-60 Seahawk, a utility maritime helicopter, and the MH-60 Jayhawk used by the US Coast Guard. There's even a further variant developed by Mitsubishi Industries.