Asia

Home page

Asia

South Korean Navy Grounds Lynx Helos

22 April 2010 01:23 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The South Korean Navy has suspended its fleet of Lynx anti-submarine helicopters following the back-to-back crashes of two of them last week, APA reports quoting defensenews.com web-page.
The service ordered emergency safety inspections of the British helicopters, a Navy official said April 19. Investigators are looking into the cause of the crashes at the same time, he said.
The Navy had operated 25 Lynx helicopters modified for anti-submarine and surface warfare. The first batch of 12 Mk.99 Lynx helicopters was delivered to the service in 1990, and the second batch of 13 Mk.99A Super Lynx helicopters in 1999.
Possible causes include an engine problem and pilot fatigue, said the official.
The export variants for South Korea are powered by two Rolls-Royce Gem 42-1 engines, whose production was halted years ago. The Navy therefore has had difficulty supplying the Gem engines but managed to secure used engines from the Royal Navy, he said.
"Investigators are looking into all possible causes of the crashes, including an engine problem, but nothing has been confirmed," the spokesman said.
Alexander W. Jun, regional director of Rolls-Royce Korea, said, "It’s true that the production of the Gem engine has been suspended, but there was not much difficulty in supplying the ROK Navy with the engine."
On April 15, a Lynx crashed off the country’s southwest coast, leaving one pilot dead and three other crew members missing. The helicopter disappeared from radar at 8:53 p.m. after losing contact with its fleet command while patrolling 15 kilometers off the coast, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
The JCS denied an allegation that the Lynx had been responding to an invasion by a North Korean submarine.
"The helicopter was on a routine nighttime mission," JCS spokesman Col. Park Sung-woo said.
The incident occurred as the country’s military was being placed on a high alert following the sinking of one of its warships in waters off the disputed sea border with North Korea.
The 1,200-ton corvette Cheonan, with 104 crew members on board, went down after an unexplained explosion. Fifty-eight sailors were rescued before the ship sank, but 46 others were missing. The bodies of 38 sailors have been recovered while eight others remain missing.
A joint investigation team involving civil and military experts is probing into the cause of the sinking, with more evidence suggesting an external impact caused by a torpedo attack or a mine explosion.
The other Lynx crashed at 22:13 p.m. April 17 in waters off the west coast on its way back to a destroyer after chasing "unidentified targets" near an island off the sea border, the JCS said. The targets were later confirmed as a group of birds, it said in a news release.
The helicopter made an emergency landing and the three pilots aboard were rescued, said the release. The helicopter was largely undamaged and was later retrieved, it said.