Polish Minister of National Defense Marisz Blaszczak said that on April 12, 2021, Poland signed an intergovernmental agreement with the United States on the acquisition of five Lockheed C-130H Hercules military transport aircraft from the US Air Force through the US program of intergovernmental foreign military sales (FMS). The aircraft will be transferred through the mechanism of the program for the sale of excess property of the US Department of Defense Excess Defense Articles (EDA) at the expense of a grant from the American side with an estimated value of the transferred property of $ 60 million. The Polish side will pay only $ 14.3 million for the deconservation, repair, re-equipment and transportation of aircraft to Poland.
Retired USAF Lockheed C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft in storage at the USAF 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG). Davis-Montana Air Force Base (Arizona), 08.05.2020 (c) Sergio A. Gamboa / US Air Force
It is reported that Poland will be transferred to the five C-130Н built in 1985, which was withdrawn from the U.S. air force in 2017 and since then has been stored in the database 309-group for storage and maintenance of aeronautical engineering, U.S. air force (309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group AMARG) at Davis-Montana (Arizona). The Poles themselves selected five C-130H aircraft from about 20 aircraft of this modification, which are now in storage in Davis-Montana (in total, more than 60 C-130 of all modifications are stored there).
The first C-130N of the five aircraft should be received by Poland by the end of 2021, and the last-in mid-2024. They will join the 14th Transport Squadron of the 33rd Transport Air Base (33. Bazie Lotnictwa Transportowego) The Polish Air Force in Powidze, where it will replace the currently in use four old C-130E Hercules aircraft built in the early 1970s, out of seven similarly received by Poland from the storage of the US Air Force in 2009-2011 (another received C-130E aircraft was written off after an emergency landing in Afghanistan in 2010, one is used as a non-flight training manual, and another was returned to the US). In Poland, the supplied C-130H aircraft will be retrofitted with the installation of some modern equipment at the 2nd Aircraft Repair Plant (Wojskowe Zakłady Lotnicze No. 2) in Bydgoszcz under a separate contract.
Recall that in September 2019, the Minister of national defence of Poland Blashak said that he had signed two official letters (Letters of request - LoR) to the Agency of the Ministry of defense for military cooperation (Defense Security Cooperation Agency DSCA) to requests for supply of Poland along the line of the us FMS program man-portable anti-tank missile systems Javelin and five military transport aircraft C-130H Hercules. The delivery of five C-130H aircraft to Poland through the EDA mechanism was approved by the US State Department on February 15, 2020.
