Lebanese officials, including then-President Michel Sleiman and then-Army Commander Gen. Jean Kahwagi, pose with one of the Sikorsky firefighting helicopters donated to the state in 2009. (Credit: Lebanese Army)
BEIRUT — Lebanon’s cash-strapped armed forces are trying to sell off multimillion-dollar equipment as part of their latest effort to secure sorely needed cash and other resources.
But the equipment — five fighter jets and and three firefighting helicopters, none of which is operational — is set to be sold for pennies on the dollar after the state’s failure to maintain it caused its value to plummet.
Following three rounds of auctions, the five fighter jets have attracted just a single bidder, a Canadian company called Lortie Aviation, the military publication Defense News reported. A deal to sell the jets is expected to be worth about $1 million.
The three Sikorsky firefighting helicopters — originally bought for nearly $14 million — have received no bidders, and the Lebanese Army is now in talks with several companies to sell the helicopters for spare parts. Given that the aircraft are out of service, they will bring in far less hard currency for the army than they would have had they been operational.
Speaking with Defense News, Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Mattar attributed the reason the aircraft have languished without repairs to the country’s economic crisis, which he said is also why the army is selling them off.
But the aircraft had not been maintained for years prior to the economic crisis’ onset in mid-2019, suggesting deeper, institutional reasons for the neglect.
Good intentions
The Sikorsky S-61 helicopters, which were built in the 1970s, were purchased from a Scottish company for $13.9 million in February 2009 by the Akhdar Dayem association, an environmental charity launched by a group of businessmen, including then-Interior Minister Ziyad Baroud as well as Fady Abboud, then the president of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists. Abboud would be appointed tourism minister in Saad Hariri’s cabinet in November of that year.
Akhdar Dayem had received roughly $7 million from Hariri, Abboud told L’Orient Today, and a further $4 million from the Association of Banks in Lebanon, among other donations. Akhdar Dayem gave the helicopters to the Defense Ministry’s Army Command in June 2009, provided they be used to help Civil Defense extinguish fires.
Abboud said the operation of the aircraft had been entrusted to the army because Civil Defense did not have pilots. Akhdar Dayem provided the army with an additional $1.1 million around the same time to pay for the initial period of maintenance.
The helicopters were used in firefighting missions for a few years before maintenance issues arose in 2013, Baroud told The Daily Star in 2019. Starting that year, only one of the three helicopters remained functional, with the army unable to afford repairing the other two. By May 2014, all three helicopters were out of commission.
The grounding exploded into scandal when massive fires broke out in the Chouf region in 2019, just as public exasperation with poor governance was reaching its peak. An army source pointed the finger at the Interior Ministry, which the source said was responsible for the helicopters given its authority over Civil Defense. The Interior Ministry said it did not have the money.
Abboud is unsympathetic to this argument: “Yes, maybe in principle the Interior Ministry owned them through Civil Defense, but what difference does this make? They were given to the army, the army accepted the million dollars from us to maintain them for the first year and then they told us, ‘From then on we will maintain them.’” A 2009 army press release confirms that the military accepted the $1 million gift.
Meanwhile, a 2017 report by Parliament’s National Defense, Interior and Municipalities Committee recommended that the Finance Ministry secure funding for the helicopters’ upkeep, which it estimated at $600,000 per year. It also noted that the Defense Ministry had asked for $5.2 million in support for the helicopters in 2016 but did not receive a response. It is not known whether funding was ever provided, but the helicopters remained nonoperational in 2019, when Lebanon was struck by the worst forest fires in decades.
As the forest fires raged in Lebanon’s mountain regions, public anger boiled over at the news that the government owned firefighting aircraft, but was unable to use them because they had not been maintained. President Michel Aoun called for an investigation into the reasons the helicopters were nonoperational and to determine who was responsible.
The army conducted an investigation and produced an internal report, a source at the Presidential Palace said. According to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the report found that spare parts were difficult to source and were expensive, and the state did not have the financial ability to buy them. It also cited technical aspects of helicopter operation but, according to the source, “Basically, they couldn’t find spare parts.” L’Orient Today was unable to review the report itself.
Smaller ambitions
Three years later, with Lebanon’s military strapped for cash and turning to foreign aid — even offering tourist flights on helicopters to help raise dollars to feed its soldiers — these helicopters are up for sale, or at least their parts are.
An anonymous official claimed to Defense News that the sales are part of a reorganization effort predating the economic crisis. The army did not respond to multiple requests from L’Orient Today to comment for this article.
News of the sale has reignited long-standing criticism of the army’s stewardship of the firefighting helicopters.
“Talk of the Sikorsky helicopters is renewed every time fires break out in Lebanon and the state fails to handle them,” a report in the media outlet Megaphone said. “It turns out that the state is not even able to sell the helicopters.”
For some, that criticism needs nuancing.
“When examining the cause of failure, we need to look at the bigger picture,” Dina Arakji, a researcher for the consulting company Control Risks, told L’Orient Today. “The military has and continues to face significant challenges with its budget. For at least a decade it has been divided between approximately 80 percent salaries and wages and the rest for other expenditures and recurrent costs. There hasn’t been local investment to improve the Lebanese military’s capabilities.”
She says maintaining the aircraft would have been expensive for the army, so it has opted to find cheaper alternatives such as locally refurbishing other models from the fleet.
The repair of the three helicopters would cost “more than 70 percent of their initial price,” an anonymous Lebanese official told Defense News, or approximately $9.7 million.
The cost of each hour spent in the air is also greater than $5,000, the source said, which is higher than that of the Huey II helicopter, which the army also uses for firefighting.
In comparison, the recent fires in the area of Qobeiyat, Akkar, had a direct cost of $25 million, according to George Mitri, who directs the land and natural resources program at the University of Balamand.
“It is clear that from the perspective of the [army], the Sikorskies were a poisoned chalice from day one,” said one analyst, who spoke with L’Orient Today on condition of anonymity, citing privacy concerns. “The [army] simply did not believe spare parts for the helicopters could be procured predictably.”
An army press release from the time the helicopters were donated, however, noted that the type of helicopter “was selected in compliance with the technical standards set by the Lebanese air force,” which followed all stages of the process. The analyst also pointed out that when the army asked for the government to provide funding to sustain the helicopters, no action was taken.
Arakji said the decision to sell the Sikorsky helicopters while refurbishing others is part of “a longer-term plan to restructure the fleet and reallocate resources amid the current crisis.” The Air Force also recently refurbished an Agusta-Bell AB 212 helicopter locally and at a lower cost, according to Arakji.
According to Defense News, the army is hoping to use the proceeds of the sale of the helicopters to purchase a fixed-wing firefighting airplane. But if the sale does not generate enough revenue, the military will buy other firefighting gear such as additional water buckets that can be carried via helicopter.