At a press conference yesterday, Acting Defence Minister Pat Conroy hinted that Australia’s fleet of Taipan helicopters were not returned to service after a fatal crash because of safety concerns. In fact, he, and actual Defence Minister Richard Marles, should be fully aware that the accident – which tragically took four lives – had nothing to do with the helicopter itself.
Instead, when asked why the Taipans are being dismantling and buried rather than donated to Ukraine, Minister Conroy continued the government’s smear campaign, saying:
“And I should also make the point that there are multiple crash investigations still going on right now to determine the cause of that tragic accident in Queensland. So, it would be irresponsible for us to move away from the disposal strategy that we’ve locked on in.”
While the full investigation into the July crash during Exercise Talisman Sabre will take many more months to complete, Defence had access to the vital Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and voice recorder within days. These show conclusively that there were no issues whatsoever with the helicopter – all its systems were functioning normally up until the moment of impact.
Confirmation of this took place on October 9, when the CEO of NATO Helicopter Industries – the consortium that manufactures Taipan and in which Airbus are the majority shareholder – Axel Aloccio said about the Australian grounding:
“We want to make clear that we believe that this decision is not linked to any particular safety concern regarding the NH90 (Taipan)….We have not identified any technical issue or any malfunction, or alarm or alert…. The aircraft… has worked without any particular issue. That is what we see in the analysis of the FDR data.”
This information was conveyed to Minister Marles soon after the crash, who nevertheless decided not to return the Taipans to service, even though they could have resumed flying. Why he approved of the further bizarre strategy of their destruction rather than storage or gifting them to Ukraine is unknown.
The NH90 / Taipan family of helicopters are remarkably safe with many more safety features than the Black Hawks that will replace them. They have better night vision equipment, fully digital flight controls, a weather radar and flotation devices, among many other features. If Ministers Marles and Conroy could be bothered just to look at Wikipedia, they can see that since 2008 there have been 11 accidents leading to the loss of eight lives – including the four Australians – have been reported across a fleet of 500 helicopters with a quarter of a million flying hours.
In fact, the Taipan smear campaign predates the current government by about a decade and has led to much of the local media adding the word “troubled” to every mention of the aircraft. As APDR has been reporting at length, on most occasions when the Army has grounded the fleet it has been for spurious reasons – or because it has failed to implement the manufacturer’s recommendations for preventative maintenance. A good example was during Talisman Sabre in 2019 when the Taipans were grounded because of a tail rotor vibration issue.
Astute observers saw that New Zealand kept flying their identical NH90s during the exercise because they had correctly carried out the necessary modification, which Australia had ignored. Following the fatal Talisman Sabre crash last year, the RNZAF came under Australian pressure to ground their helicopters to not make our people look bad – but within a couple of days they were flying again.
Peak Australian stupidity was reached earlier in the program when someone in Army noticed that the cargo hook for the Taipans contained cadmium. Cadmium is one of the most common elements in commercial and military aviation and even though it is hazardous by itself when bonded with other metals is totally safe. However, that wasn’t good enough for Army and consequently – and at great expense – Australia ordered the manufacture of a unique set of cargo hooks from which all cadmium has been removed.
Acting Minister Conroy also asserted that the Taipans had to be trashed because no one was interested in buying them because Defence had followed a “process” and hadn’t found any international interest. It would take many months just to put together a complete package for the sale of the helicopters, their training devices, spare parts, and support equipment. In this context the “process” that Defence claims to have followed must be no more than an attempted act of mental telepathy on the part of someone in Army Aviation.
Hopefully, the Ministers – and their officials – will be obliged to supply many more details about why they are destroying $900 million worth of Taipans. In the meantime, Ukraine will just have to keep fighting on in the knowledge that rather than save the lives of their wounded soldiers, Australia instead prefers to bury helicopters that they no longer want.
And finally: contrary to repeated claims from the Prime Minister down, Australia is not the largest non-NATO contributor to Ukraine. We have fallen behind both Japan and South Korea and are now 16th on the list.
As a proportion of GDP, the Australian contribution is even further behind, coming in after military and economic juggernauts such as Malta, Ireland and Iceland.
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