In 2019, the Ministry of Defense of Poland ordered the PZL Świdnik company to conduct tests of the endurance resource of airframes for attack helicopters of the Mi-24 type.
According to the contract, such tests should have been completed in 2021, but in fact they are still ongoing, which postpones the actual start of the Polish Mi-24 modernization for at least 3 years, the Defense24 portal says.
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In 2019, the Polish defense concern PGZ showed a project to modernize the Mi-24, which involved increasing the life of the airframe by 5,000 hours and installing an optical-electronic station and equipping such helicopters with Spike anti-tank missiles.
Such a complex of improvements for 28 Polish Mi-24 helicopters was supposed to be an interim "budgetary" solution before Poland would purchase 32 attack helicopters of Western production under the Perkoz program.
But now, according to Defence24, the Ministry of Defense of Poland is waiting for the end of endurance tests in order to determine the further feasibility of modernizing these attack helicopters.
And at the same time, Poland already has the opportunity to buy Western attack helicopters under the FMS (foreign military sales) program, skipping the stage of modernization of the Soviet helicopters.
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