The army is seeking to purchase an additional 30 Sikorsky UH-60 Armed Black Hawk helicopters, as well as looking into upgrading its fleet of UH-60M Black Hawks with Hellfire missiles, rockets and autocannons, a source with knowledge of the matter said yesterday on condition of anonymity.
The army has a surplus of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, but lacks sufficient platforms outside the Boeing AH-64 Apache, the Bell AH-1 Cobra and the Bell OH-58 Kiowa, the source said.
Despite their superior numbers within the army, the UH-60 does not possess the racks and system to attach and fire missiles, the source said.
Photo: Yu Tai-lang, Taipei Times
The nation fields 58 Black Hawks, of which 30 were assigned to the army, 14 to the air force and 14 to the Ministry of the Interior’s National Air Service Corps, the source said.
Taiwan purchased 60 helicopters from the US, but two have crashed, with one of the incidents in 2020 resulting in the death of eight people, including Taiwan’s then-chief of the general staff General Shen Yi-ming (沈一鳴), the nation’s most senior military official ever killed in such an incident.
The army received UH-60Ms, which can deploy two machine guns, while the National Air Service Corps’ craft were outfitted with infrared scanning equipment before delivery.
The military is looking into ways that would allow the army to deploy sufficient helicopters in the event of losses in a conflict, the source said.
The military expressed interest in acquiring the Armed Black Hawk version after Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky, the manufacturer, in September last year released footage of live-fire exercises in Arizona conducted by the variant.
The video showed a pilot with an ANVIS/HUD-24 helmet-mounted display and tracker system, with the helicopter carrying an electro-optical infrared sensor on the nose, M134 7.62mm mini-guns at each cabin door, a pair of GAU-19 .50 Gatling guns, a 70mm Hydra rocket pod and a rack of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.
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