End of Exercise Hot Blade 2018

The statistics of the exercise is quite impressive: the Hungarian soldiers participated in five complex air operations and twenty training tasks. The work of the engineering staff was invaluable as well, it is thanks to them that the helicopters flew in excellent technical condition all along the exercise.

The flight trainings were also very successful. Further considerable steps were taken among others in the area of night vision capability and high-altitude training. Together with the Portuguese troops, the Hungarians accomplished fast rope descent, water hoist, waterborne airdrop, tactical insert/extract tasks, and parachute airdrops.

During the closing ceremony of the exercise, the hosts praised the interoperability of the Hungarians. It has been proved that the participants as the members of the EDA Helicopter Exercise Program (HEP) can gain such amount of knowledge and experiences in the “Blade" type exercises, which is only possible in this system and in this community.

The team’s main challenge was the outward and the return flight. They had to bridge the Szolnok-Beja distance in almost 14 hours. May 24 justly deserved the “longest day" description, in the history of the Hungarian military helicopter flights. In the course of the seven hour flight, with crew rotation and two refuelling – in which they covered 1470 kilometres –, they managed to travel from North Spain through France and Italy up to Slovenia.