Reply #4: Mothballed choppers will be updated for war [View All]

[maddezmom]

Marines are addressing shortage of heavy-lift craft by taking 3 copters out of storage.

The Associated Press

The Marine Corps is coping with a shortage of heavy cargo helicopters by dusting off choppers that have been mothballed in Tucson for a decade and retrofitting them for service.

Civilian maintenance workers at the Naval Air Depot at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station this week will start cleaning and updating three shelved Navy MH-53E Sea Dragons stored until last week at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. It could take 20 months to transform them into the Marine version of the aircraft, the Super Stallion.

The Marines have been forced into taking the extraordinary step because they have only 150 of their only heavy-lift workhorses left in their fleet. Six Super Stallions have been destroyed in crashes since 2001, and the rest are logging long hours in the air in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They're coasting on legacy fleets," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense consulting company in Fairfax, Va. "They planned to coast indefinitely ... and it would have worked just fine if it hadn't been for Afghanistan and Iraq."

more:http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=082205a1_marinehelicopters