Türkiye to buy 12 ex-RAF C-130J Super Hercules
December 2, 2024
Reports first emerged that Türkiye was planning to buy twelve of the 15 ex-Royal Air Force Super Hercules transport aircraft stored at Cambridge in July 2024, a few weeks after Lockheed Martin acknowledged that most of the 15 C-130Js that the Royal Air Force had retired “now have a home”.
The first of 66 first generation C-130K Hercules C.Mk 1s (XV177) was delivered to the RAF on 19 Dec 1966. Some 30 aircraft were subsequently converted to C.Mk 3 standards. These had a stretched fuselage, with a 100 in (2.5 m) plug aft of the cockpit and an 80 in (2.0 m) plug at the rear of the fuselage. The last RAF ‘heritage Herks’ made their final operational flights on 25 October 2013.
By then, the first generation Herks had been augmented by 25 C-130J Super Hercules, the RAF being the launch customer for the new variant, which had Allison AE2100 turboprop engines and Dowty Aerospace six-bladed composite propellers. The RAF received 15 stretched C-130J-30s (locally known as the Hercules C.Mk 4) and ten standard C-130Js (Hercules C.Mk 5). These entered service from 1998. Two of the C.Mk 4s were lost in non fatal accidents in Iraq. One had to be blown up after being damaged by an IED landing at a forward airstrip, the other damaged beyond repair after a heavy landing.
Most of the short-fuselage C.Mk 5s were retired between 2016-2018, and the Royal Air Force retired its last C-130J Hercules aircraft on 30 June 2023, mounting a farewell flypast across the UK by three aircraft on 15 June. This brought to an end more than 56 years of service by the C-130K and later C-130J.
Two Hercules C.Mk 5s were sold to Bahrain, and five to Bangladesh, while another went to the US Navy as a support aircraft for the Blue Angels display team.
The decision to sell off the RAF’s 15 surviving C-130Js was announced in the 2021 Defence Command Paper, when it was expected that the sale would be managed by the UK Defence Equipment Sales Authority (DESA) and undertaken between 2023 and 2025.
The Türk Hava Kuvvetleri Komutanlığı (Turkish Air Force Command) received six C-130Bs and 14 C-130Es, and currently has 19 of these in service. One of the E-models was written off on 19 October 1968 when it flew into a mountain while on approach to land at Akhisar AB, killing all seven crew.
These surviving 19 Hercules are being upgraded to C-130BM and C-130EM standards under the Erciyes Avionics Modernisation Programme, which was launched in 2006 and is being carried out by Turkish Aerospace and the 2nd Hava İkmal Bakim Merkezi Komutanlığı (2nci HIBM.K or 2nd Air Supply and Maintenance Centre) at Kayseri-Erkilet, at the direction of the Defence Industry Agency (SSB). The upgrade is intended to ensure that the aircraft can operate safely into the 2040s, and complies with GATM, RVSM and CAT-II ILS requirements.
The original fully analogue cockpit is being converted to an NVIS capable digital cockpit with four MFDs, two CDUs and two Multi-Mission Computers. The aircraft is also gaining Link 16 Tactical Data Link Integration and a new flight management system. The first prototype aircraft (the first C-130EM) was delivered to the Turkish Air Forces Command on 8 August 2014, and the second (the first C-130BM) followed in December 2016. A 20th airframe (the former Royal Saudi Air Force 65-0451) was delivered to Kayseri but may now be stripped for spares.
Acquisition of the 12 ex-RAF C-130Js will reinforce the existing Turkish C-130 fleet, rather than replacing it, and may lead to the formation of a new squadron to operate alongside the existing 222 Filo.
