The iconic Black Hawk helicopter to be replaced by a new-look aircraft.

The legendary American Black Hawk helicopter which featured in one of the US Army’s most disastrous counter-insurgency operations in Somalia nearly 30 years ago is finally to end its days and is to be replaced in a new multi-billion dollar programme awarded this week. Black Hawk Down, the title of a book and a Hollywood film, were the three words that summed up the incident on October 3-4, 1993. Nineteen members of US special forces units, Rangers and Delta Force, were killed when two of the helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu. Codenamed Super 61 and Super 64, they were both hit by rocket-propelled grenades fired by militia forces under the command of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The brutal images of the dead soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu became for ever linked to that disastrous moment in US military history. The twin-engined UH-60 Black Hawk, built by Sikorsky, has been one of the US Army’s primary combat troop-carrying helicopters since the 1970s and served extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, during the 1993 incident the helicopters became vulnerable to withering ground fire as Aidid’s militia targeted the Black Hawks which were packed with special forces soldiers. Operation Gothic Serpent, aimed at snatching two of Aidid’s most senior lieutenants from a three-storey stronghold in Mogadishu, was a high-risk mission involving around 160 troops. The plan ws to fast-rope down from the Black Hawks to enter the building and seize the two militia commanders. Hundreds of Somalis as well as the 19 American soldiers were killed in a battle which lasted two days. In another famous incident, a special forces-adapted Black Hawk , an MH-60, crashed when trying to land in the compound where Osama bin Laden was living. Black Hawks and Chinooks were used to ferry the US Navy’s Seal Team Six commandos to the compound n Abbottabad in Pakistan on May 3, 2011. No one was killed when one of the Black Hawks crashed. Now the veteran Black Hawk is to be replaced by a futuristic-looking V-280 helicopter built by the Bell company, beating a joint rival bid by Sikorsky and Boeing. Bell has been awarded an initial contract worth $232 million to develop the V-280 which will be a tilt-rotor helicopter, similar to the V-22 Osprey already in service. The tilt-rotor system allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically as normal but can fly at speeds equivalent to a fixed-wing aircraft. A prototype for the new helicopter is expected to be completed by 2025. The US army calls the new helicopter programme the “future long-range assault aircraft”. The project could be worth mor than $70 billion for Bell which is owned by Textron, based in Fort Worth, Texas.