Black Hawk: Where the roads end

Colombian Armed Forces · Photography · Since 2011

The aircraft

Sikorsky built the UH-60 Black Hawk in the 1970s for a hard brief from the US Army: carry a squad of soldiers into a fight and survive the trip. It first flew in October 1974 and entered service in 1979. Two engines, a crew of four, room for up to eleven equipped troops, and a hook underneath that can lift up to 9,000 pounds on later models. Around 5,000 have been built since.

In Colombia

Colombia’s first Black Hawks arrived in the late 1980s. Since then the Air Force, the Army and the National Police have built much of their helicopter work around it, and Colombia has become the largest Black Hawk customer in Latin America. By 2011 the fleet had already flown more than 300,000 hours over mountains, jungle and rivers, in a country where many places are still easier to reach by air than by road.

What it does

In a single week the same aircraft can fly an air assault at dawn, a medical evacuation at midday and a supply run to a remote post before dark. Crews use it for search and rescue with a hoist, for disaster relief when floods or landslides cut communities off, and for carrying soldiers in and out of places no truck can reach. The Air Force also flies an armed version, the AH-60 Arpía.

The people

A helicopter is only as good as the people around it. Pilots, crew chiefs, door gunners, and the technicians who spend the night in the hangar so it can fly in the morning. That is where we pointed the camera: on the flight line, inside the hangar and at the open door.