After flying more than 18,000 hours in Afghanistan, moving more than 7,900 tonnes of kit and stores and transporting over 130,000 personnel since 2009, RAF Merlin helicopters have finished their deployment in the Helmand region, where they have primarly flown troop transport missions.
The following images where released by the UK MoD, and show one of the large, partly disassembled choppers (the same used for the 2012 Olympic opener and latest 007 movie) inside a RAF C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft used to bring the Merlins back home.
Image credit: Sergeant Barry Pope, Crown copyright
David Cenciotti is a freelance journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written four books.
Predator UAVs have often been the subject of articles published on this site as drones are some of the emerging technologies of the modern battlefield. Recently, the Aeronautica Militare opened the Ground Control Station (GCS) […]
The following picture, sent by a reader of the blog, shows what remains of one of the six Harrier jets in the aftermath of the Taliban attack on Camp Bastion on Sept. 14, 2012. As […]
Just released by the White House, this photograph, taken on May 1, at Bagram airfield, shows Barack Obama talking with Ambassador Ryan Crocker aboard Marine One moments before the helicopter took off to bring the […]
