Poland's Ministry of Defense announced that their Air Force received an AW149 helicopter that was manufactured under license at the Polish PZL-Świdnik plant. Delivery is being carried out under a contract concluded back in 2022.
Then under the contract, 31 AW149 units were to arrive, some of which will be manufactured at the Leonardo plant (the developer and main manufacturer of these helicopters), and most at the local PZL-Świdnik plant in Poland. Some of the ordered helicopters manufactured at the Leonardo plant were already delivered to Poland earlier.
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Interestingly, production at the PZL-Świdnik enterprise in Poland was opened only at the beginning of June 2024. That is, from the moment production started to the arrival of the first helicopter, almost a year and a half passed, which is actually quite fast.
Regarding the AW149 itself, it's a multipurpose helicopter capable of carrying up to 19 paratroopers without equipment and 18 with equipment, besides this it can also be armed with various weapons, which makes it not just a transport.
Among the armament it can carry are AGM-114 Hellfire II, suspended containers with machine guns and automatic cannons, unguided aircraft rockets, and unnamed 70mm guided missiles, which are probably FZ275 LGR from Thales.
The latter are a direct analogue of the American APKWS. Thanks specifically to them and suspended containers with machine guns and automatic cannons, the AW149 can become an excellent Shahed-killer that will be capable of effectively and most importantly cheaply intercepting long-range strike drones, including Shahed-type.
These AW149s in Poland are supposed to replace the fleet of old Mi-2 and W-3 Sokol helicopters, of which they have 61 and 34 units respectively.
And by the way, they wrote off all these Mi-2s together just in September this year. Interestingly, the Poles decided on a helicopter back in March 2021, but they spent the next year and a half on bidding, because Leonardo wanted to supply an older and weaker version, the AW139.
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