(C) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty [1]:
Dozens Of Afghan Helicopters Have Now Arrived At The U.S. Air Force’s Boneyard
Date: 2022-01 [2]
A total of 24 helicopters that once belonged to the defunct Afghan Air Force are now at the U.S. military's main aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Over the past few weeks, an additional four Russian-made Mi-17 Hip transports and 17 MD 530F Little Bird armed light helicopters have joined the three Mi-17s that arrived last month. The War Zone was first to report on the delivery of that initial trio. Air Force Materiel Command's (AFMC) public affairs office provided this update on how many ex-Afghan Air Force aircraft are at the boneyard to The War Zone. AFMC had previously explained that the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Management Office-Afghanistan, which is headquartered in Qatar, is overseeing the consolidation of these airframes at Davis-Monthan.
US Army An Mi-17 Hip helicopter bound for Afghanistan is loaded into a cargo plane in 2018.
It is not clear how many former Afghan Air Force Mi-17s, MD 530Fs, or other types that had belonged to that service the U.S. military ultimately plans to relocate to Arizona. As of July, the month before the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, the Afghan Air Force had 13 Mi-17s and 49 MD 530Fs, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a U.S. government watchdog.
SIGAR A table offering a summary of the Afghan Air Force's inventory based on data available to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as of July 2021.
However, at that same time, SIGAR acknowledged that this was not necessarily a complete accounting of the full Afghan inventories of either of those helicopters. For instance, the Afghan military's Special Mission Wing, a separate, secretive special operations aviation unit — data about which remains classified — operated at least some number of Mi-17s. Furthermore, SIGAR subsequently said that at least six helicopters, a mixture of both Hips and UH-60A+ Black Hawks, were overseas undergoing maintenance at the time of the Taliban takeover. Afghan media reports had suggested the total number of Afghan Air Force aircraft being repaired in other countries might have been as high as 25, according to the watchdog.
In addition, satellite imagery that The War Zone had obtained from Planet Labs in August showed at least 19 Mi-17-type helicopters at Termez Airport in Uzbekistan, where various Afghan Air Force aircraft had fled in the face of the Taliban conquest. While it was later determined that some of the Hips at Termez belonged to the Uzbek government, the bulk of them did not. Other ex-Afghan Air Force aircraft escaped to Tajikistan, but Mi-17s or any other kinds of helicopters do not appear to have been among them. The Taliban is known to have captured at least 12 more Mi-17s, in various states of airworthiness, as well. All this makes clear that the total number of Hips alone in the Afghan military's inventory prior to its collapse was clearly significantly higher than SIGAR had previously reported and otherwise calls into question the completeness of the data available to them.
PHOTO © 2021 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION A satellite image showing various ex-Afghan Air Force aircraft, including Mi-17 helicopters, at Termez Airport in Uzbekistan in August 2021.
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[2] Url:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43461/dozens-of-afghan-helicopters-have-now-been-delivered-to-the-u-s-air-forces-boneyard
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