RAAF C-130H drawdown begins

It’s a trade-off: that’s how May’s budget announcement that the RAAF’s eight remaining C-130H Hercules would be withdrawn between one to four years early was largely seen – a way of helping save the long-running AIR 8000 Battlefield Airlifter project from the axe.

The C-130H entered service in 1978, and after mid-life upgrades in the late 1990s and early 2000s including a cockpit avionics upgrade and structural refurbishment of the fuselage longerons, was to have been retired in 2013. In recent years, industry reportedly was asked to propose supporting the C-130H out to 2016 following the conversion of the require-ment for two more C-130Js to a C-17 and the retirement of the Caribou.