Quote Originally Posted by Flying10uk View Post
Watching Sky News earlier this evening there was a short "snippet" that I happened to hear along the lines of "UKicon sending Search and Rescue helicopters to Ukraine.". I was surprised to see a photo of a Sea King helicopter shown at the same time as the last one retired from Royal Navy service a few years ago. Looking online, sure enough, apparently, the UK is supplying 3 Sea Kings to Ukraine and one has already arrived. It is interesting to know that, apparently, there were still some available capable of being made airworthy, reasonably easily one would presume.
Technically, while the Sea King had been retired from UK military service some years ago.....there was still two that remained airworthy and flying since then on the military register, and a third was later brought back to airworthy. These 3 could be seen on a regular basis flying during the past 5 or so years around the south coast, being operated by HeliOps in Portland who have been operating 3 x ex-RN Mk.5's on the military register under a contract to train Germanicon Marineflieger SAR aircrews for a good few years, who still operate the Sea King and that contract ended a short while ago, but they were then contracted by UK Govt to train Ukraine crews as a follow-on, and its these 3 x airworthy Sea Kings that are being donated to Ukraine. They were already airworthy and flying, they weren't made airworthy just for Ukraine.
HeliOps have a huge hangar full of Sea-Kings and pretty much the entire store of ex-MOD parts supply for them.