As the NZ military prepares to sell off decades-old aircraft, it has been revealed it passed up an offer to expand its fleet of helicopters . The New Zealand Defence Force turned down an opportunity to buy additional helicopters from Australia due to the “challenging and costly” task of adapting them, not because of personnel shortages, the military says.

However, the NZDF has acknowledged it is still facing difficulties in recruiting enough crew for its fleet of NH90 helicopters and could have problems sustaining a long-term deployment overseas.

The Australian military decided to put its fleet of MRH90 Taipan helicopters – a variant of the NH90 – into early retirement last September after one of the helicopters crashed during a training exercise near the Whitsundays, killing all four soldiers on board.

Although an inquiry into the cause of the crash only began last week, the Australian government decided to bring forward the pre-planned replacement of the helicopters with US-made Black Hawks.

A number of other countries’ militaries, including New Zealand, are still operating the largely identical NH90s and were approached by Australia to see if they wished to purchase their retired helicopters.

In an Australian Senate estimates hearing held last month, Major General Jeremy King said New Zealand was the only country that had expressed an interest in buying the Taipans as entire aircraft – rather than for parts – but “eventually stepped back” from making an offer. 

Ukraine’s government subsequently asked if it could receive the Taipans as a donation to help in its ongoing battle against Russia’s invasion, with the chief of the country’s defence intelligence service citing New Zealand’s success with NH90s as an example of how it could overcome any servicing challenges.

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“Ukraine is 13 times smaller than Australia, which allows us to create a single defended maintenance hub, similar to the New Zealand NH90 operations,” Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov wrote in a letter to Australian defence minister Richard Marles obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald.

However, the Australian government said the Taipans had already begun to be stripped for spare parts and were too far through the disposal process to be returned to flying condition.

Although several other countries have expressed dissatisfaction with maintenance issues related to their NH90s, their manufacturer maintains they are safe to fly, and the NZDF has previously received praise overseas for the reliability of its own fleet.

However, broader problems with the recruitment and retention of defence personnel have begun to bite; in January, the NZ Herald reported on the contents of an NZDF briefing to the last government, warning that “low crew numbers present risks to sustained deployments” of Air Force helicopters offshore.

In a statement, a Defence Force spokesman told Newsroom the military had considered a number of options regarding the retired Taipans, but had ultimately focused on seeking to buy spare parts and support equipment “to increase [the] pool size and improve long-term fleet supportability” of the existing NH90s rather than seeking to expand the fleet.

“Increasing the New Zealand NH90 fleet size would have been a significant undertaking. The Australian MRH90 helicopters are similar but of a sufficiently different configuration to New Zealand’s NH90s, so standardising the fleet would have been a challenging and costly activity.”

The spokesman said current shortages of defence personnel played no part in the decision, but acknowledged the growth of crew numbers for the NH90s “continues to be a challenge but remains a priority”.

“Recently the NZDF has successfully deployed NH90s to the Solomon Islands and the Air Force is ready to deploy internationally again when directed by [the] Government, acknowledging that crew numbers required to sustain longer deployments remains an issue.”

A spokeswoman for Defence Minister Judith Collins told Newsroom work was underway on a new defence capability plan, which would provide the Government with a range of options (including indicative timings and costs) for new investments. The Defence Force was also developing a workforce strategy to determine its future size, shape and composition, while transitioning the military to “modern personnel management practices”.

Hercules descend from the heavens

Meanwhile, the military is working on getting rid of its own retired aircraft, having issued a request for proposals for the sale of its four C-130H Hercules planes.

The aircraft were first purchased in the 1960s and had increasingly shown their age in recent years; at one point in 2019, the defence minister Ron Mark revealed that all of the planes were temporarily out of action at the same time due to maintenance issues and faults.

The Labour-led government subsequently signed a deal to replace the ageing planes with more modern C-130J Super Hercules aircraft, which are due to be delivered to New Zealand starting later this year.

The Defence Force spokesman said any sales of the retired Hercules would be subject to the approval of both the New Zealand and American governments, and one of the aircraft could be sent to the Air Force Museum in Christchurch.