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August 27, 2005
The technical and testing delays in getting the MV-22 tilt-rotor transport aircraft into service, plus the heavy workload for U.S. Marine Corps heavy helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan, has led to a desperate, and very rare, measure. The marines are restoring three mothballed helicopters to active service. This is rarely done. But the 150 CH-53 helicopters the marines currently use are old, and require a lot of maintenance to keep them going. So three similar MH-53E helicopters, which have been sitting in an Arizona storage site since the mid 1990s, are being refurbished to become CH-53s. The process will take about twenty months. In the next few years, MV-22 transports will begin entering service. But by 2010, the marines will have to start retiring about fifteen CH-53s a year, as the choppers reach the end of their useful lives. The conversion of the MH-53Es into CH-53s will be done by the same mechanics and technicians who do major maintenance on the CH-53s. Since this sort of conversion has never been done before, the technicians will document what they have to do to convert the first MH-53E, and, in effect, write the book.
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