Colombia receives Dauphin helicopters
One of the two Dauphins being delivered to Colombia this month wears the livery of the DIMAR (Dirección Maritima), which is the country’s civil maritime administration. The DIMAR is dependant on the country’s defence ministry and managed by an admiral, as the budget for it was supplied by the defence ministry. (Colombian Navy)
The Colombian Navy is set to receive two recently purchased Airbus AS365N3 Dauphin helicopters.
The Dauphins have already been assembled at Guaymaral civil airport in Bogotá, painted in Colombian colours with serial numbers ARC 251 and 252, and are expected to be delivered on 7 January to the Grupo Aeronaval del Caribe (the Colombian Navy’s Caribbean Naval Air Group).
The helicopters will operate from Barranquilla Naval Aviation Base, but their main mission will be to operate from the Colombian Navy’s ARC 20 de Julio-class offshore patrol vessels.
Both helicopters were purchased in Portugal but had operated in Brazil, where ARC 251 was serialled PR-HJR and ARC 252 was at first PR-HJS and later CS-HIP. The Colombian Navy initially plans to equip them with a new Telephonics APS-143C V3 synthetic aperture radar, with subsequent upgrades looking to introduce the carriage of sonobuoys and torpedoes to provide an anti-submarine warfare capability.
As the Bell 412 helicopters currently with the Grupo Aeronaval del Caribe cannot fit into the hangars of the Colombian Navy’s Almirante Padilla-class frigates, the Dauphins will also increase the capacity of those ships for embarked operations, replacing retired Bo-105, the BK-117, and Fennec rotorcraft. The wheeled landing gear of the Dauphins also makes deck operations easier compared to the skid undercarriages of the types they are replacing.
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