40 Hours of Maintenance for 1 Hour of Flight Time: Army Chief Outlines Sheer Cost of Taipan Fleet

Australia is projected to incur significant savings on the cost of maintaining the now-shuttered MRH-90 Taipan helicopter with their replacements, the UH-60 Black Hawks, with officials revealing the cost to be about one-fifth of their predecessors. Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, told a Senate Estimates hearing that the new Black Hawk helicopters cost up to $12,000 every flight hour, compared to the $58,000 per flight hour for the Taipans. The U.S.-made aircraft also require a fraction of the maintenance time. “We’ve flown about just around 200 hours on our Black Hawks. We’re sitting at about five, six maintenance man hours,” Major General Jeremy King told the Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade Senate Estimates Committee....