Jorge –

Incorrect. The Spanish MoD undertook a review before its selection, and industry was well aware of the procurement intention.

T.

Well, I´m not sure of the final MoD election, but the officers who made the “operational” evaluation wanted the Blackhawk, that´s what one of FAMET´s (Army air corps) Headquarters officer at Colmenar told me. Of course, I understand that this kind of purchase is a big thing , and a lot of considerations should be made, not only the military opinion counts, but the industrial and political too. By the way, the same officer told us that Eurocopter technical service was far from good. Apparently, when a user asks them for an item, Eurocopter waits until they have X orders of that item to make it.

About the SH-60 and the UH-60 being the same helo or not, I´m not sure, I´ve always seen them treated as different helos in the press or books, but I guess you can think of them as different versions of the same machine. Vamos, que tampoco tengo mucha idea, jeje.

Anyway, I hope that these new helicopters will help to improve the army air corps situation, as we have read very disturbing reports in the press recently, about very low service rates of the helicopters. Althought these NH90s are going to be for the Navy mostly.
Regards

Yep, Portugal has NH90s , they get them last year.

Talking about Eurocopter, I think that the decission on purchasing the NH-90 is very influenced by the previous goverment´s purchase of Eurocopter´s Tiger. The tigers are going to be built here in spain because of the eurocopter-goverment agreement. So they are setting a new factory at Albacete (BTW, a lot of controversy here about where to set this new plant, different regional goverments fought for it hard). Well, I guess the spanish defence minister will ask for workload in the NH90 programm as a return , so they can maintain the new factory after the end of the Tiger´s manufacturing (the building of 25 helicopters or so can´t take too much)