Wokka Wokka: The Story of the Boeing Chinook Helicopter

Nobody has ever called the Chinook beautiful. It looks like a removal lorry that has taken up flying, and it sounds like one too: a deep, rolling "wokka-wokka" that you hear long before you see it and feel in your chest long after it has gone.

Soldiers from Helmand to the Falklands will tell you it is the loveliest noise in the world, because it usually means that somebody is coming to fetch them.

The Boeing CH-47 Chinook first flew in September 1961. More than sixty years later it is still in production, still in front-line service with the Royal Air Force and the United States Army, and on order for customers who intend to keep flying it well into the second half of this century.

Few military aircraft of any kind have lasted so long, and fewer still have been so thoroughly loved by the people who fly in the back.

This is the story of how an American design for carrying a platoon of infantry became the heavy lifter of choice for twenty nations, and the backbone of British battlefield aviation.

It covers the design and specifications, the Falklands and Bravo November, Northern Ireland, the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan, America's wars from Vietnam to the bin Laden raid, the civil Chinook and the Sumburgh disaster, and the floods, fires and dams that have kept the type busy at home.

Every fact has been checked against at least two independent sources, drawing on official histories, museum records, government reports and the specialist press, and where respected sources disagree we say so.

A Helicopter Built for a Platoon: Origins, 1956 to 1962

The Chinook began with an American problem. In the late 1950s the United States Army wanted a turbine-powered helicopter big enough to carry a whole platoon of infantry, or two to three tons of cargo, without the piston engines that made its existing transport helicopters thirsty, heavy and temperamental.

The Vertol Aircraft Corporation of Morton, Pennsylvania, was the obvious firm to ask. It had grown out of Frank Piasecki's company, whose tandem-rotor helicopters had been flying since the 1940s.

Vertol first offered its Model 107, and the Army ordered a handful as the YHC-1A, but soldiers judged it too heavy for an assault helicopter and too light for a transport. The 107 found a better home with the United States Marine Corps as the CH-46 Sea Knight, and Vertol went back to the drawing board with something larger.

That larger design, the Model 114, won the Army's medium transport helicopter competition in June 1959, against bids from five manufacturers, and an order followed for five pre-production aircraft designated YHC-1B. Before they flew, the company changed hands: Boeing bought Vertol on 31 March 1960, which is why the aircraft has carried the Boeing name ever since.

The first YHC-1B to fly, serial 59-4983, lifted off on 21 September 1961. Deliveries to the Army began in August 1962, and under the new tri-service designation system introduced that year the HC-1B became the CH-47A. Within three years it would be at war.

Why "Chinook"?

The name comes from the Chinook people of the lower Columbia River and the Pacific coast of what is now Washington and Oregon. It follows a United States Army custom, dating from the years after the Second World War, of naming its helicopters after Native American peoples and leaders.

The first was the H-13 Sioux, and the tradition was later written into Army regulations in 1969. The Chinook has kept company with the Iroquois (the "Huey"), the Kiowa, the Apache and the Black Hawk ever since.

The warm, snow-melting Chinook wind that blows down the eastern slopes of the Rockies shares the same root, having been named after the people who lived where it came from. It is a pleasing coincidence for an aircraft that produces a hurricane of its own every time it lands, but the Army named the helicopter after the people, not the weather.

Two Rotors, No Tail: How the Tandem Layout Works

The Chinook's defining feature is its pair of three-bladed rotors, one above the cockpit and one on top of the tall rear pylon, turning in opposite directions. Every single-rotor helicopter has to deal with torque, the tendency of the fuselage to spin the opposite way to the rotor, and most do it with a tail rotor that pushes sideways to hold the nose straight.

That tail rotor contributes nothing to lift. On the Chinook the two main rotors cancel each other's torque, so there is no tail rotor at all, and all of the engines' power goes into holding the aircraft up.

Piasecki's own rationale for tandem rotors, written about his first "Dogship" for the United States Navy in the 1940s, was that two rotors let him keep the disc loading low while using blades of a length that could actually be manufactured, and that they allowed a far greater range of centre of gravity. In plain English, a Chinook does not much mind where you put the load.

A single-rotor helicopter has to be carefully balanced; a Chinook can take a lorry-load of stores at one end and a handful of passengers at the other and still fly happily.

Two Lycoming (now Honeywell) T55 turboshaft engines sit on either side of the rear pylon. They feed a combining transmission, and long drive shafts running along the top of the fuselage carry power forward to the front rotor.

Either engine can drive both rotors, and the two rotors are mechanically locked in step so that their overlapping blades pass between each other without ever meeting. That synchronisation is the heart of the design, and as the North Sea would one day show, the consequences are dreadful if it is lost.

The cost of all this is complexity. The Chinook carries a lot of gearbox, shafting and rotor head, and it needs a stiff fuselage to cope with the vibration. It is not the most agile helicopter in the sky.

But for lifting heavy things into awkward places, at altitude and in heat, the tandem layout has never been bettered.

Chinook Specifications at a Glance

Published figures for the Chinook vary a good deal, partly because there have been so many versions and partly because engine power, weights and speeds can be quoted as maximum, continuous or cruising figures. The numbers below are for the modern CH-47F and the RAF's equivalent, taken from Boeing, the US Army and the Royal Air Force. Where they disagree, the range is given.

Crew: three in US Army service (two pilots and a flight engineer); four in the RAF (two pilots and two crewmen).

Rotor diameter: 60 ft (18.3 m), two three-bladed rotors.

Length, rotors turning: 98 ft 11 in (30.1 m). The fuselage alone is 51 ft 2 in (15.6 m).

Height: about 18 ft 8 in (5.7 m).

Empty weight: about 24,600 lb (11,150 kg).

Maximum weight: 50,000 lb (22,680 kg) for the CH-47F, rising to 54,000 lb (24,490 kg) for the Block II.

Engines: two Honeywell T55-GA-714A turboshafts, rated at between 4,168 shp (the RAF's figure) and about 4,777 shp (Boeing's) each, depending on which rating is quoted.

Maximum speed: 170 knots (about 196 mph).

Cruising speed: about 157 to 160 knots.

Service ceiling: 20,000 ft for the latest version, according to Boeing. Older D models were quoted at around 15,000 ft.

Troops: 33 in the standard US Army seating plan; up to 55 in RAF service.

Stretchers: 24.

Cargo: about 10 tonnes, by the RAF's figure. The three hooks under the fuselage are rated at 26,000 lb for the centre hook and 17,000 lb each for the front and rear hooks, or 25,000 lb when the front and rear hooks share a load.

Those figures make the Chinook, on the US Army's own published numbers, slightly faster at full stretch than the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. A removal lorry it may look like, but it is a quick one.

From CH-47A to Block II: The Variants

The CH-47A of 1962 was the basic machine, with around 350 built. The CH-47B of 1967 brought more powerful engines and redesigned blades, and 108 were delivered.

The CH-47C, which first flew on 14 October 1967, had stronger transmissions, still more power and extra fuel, and became the first Chinook to sell in real numbers abroad.

The CH-47D, which entered US Army service in 1982, was not so much a new aircraft as a new lease of life. Hundreds of A, B and C models were stripped back to their airframes and rebuilt with glass-fibre rotor blades, uprated engines and transmissions, better flight controls and the three cargo hooks under the belly that remain a Chinook trademark.

The CH-47F, which first flew on 25 June 2001 and reached its first Army unit in 2007, did the same trick again with a digital cockpit, a new machined airframe designed to cut vibration and fatigue, and digital engine controls.

The latest US Army standard, the CH-47F Block II, was first delivered on 1 July 2024. It is designed to fly at up to 54,000 lb, some 4,000 lb heavier than the Block I, with an improved drivetrain and lighter fuel tanks.

For special forces there is the MH-47, now in its G version, with air-to-air refuelling, terrain-following radar and enormous side fuel tanks that make it the longest-ranged helicopter the US Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flies.

The type has also been built under licence twice: by Elicotteri Meridionali in Italy from 1970, and by Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Japan from the mid-1980s.

How many Chinooks have been built in total is harder to say than you might think, because so many D and F models are rebuilds of older airframes that a single helicopter can appear in three different production tallies. "More than 1,200" is the figure most sources are comfortable with.

Vietnam: Guns on Mountaintops

The Chinook went to war in September 1965 with the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), whose Chinooks formed the 228th Assault Support Helicopter Battalion. The 147th Assault Support Helicopter Company followed at the end of November, and many more units followed as the war grew.

Its most celebrated work was putting artillery where no road could reach. The M102 105mm howitzer, introduced in 1966, weighed about 3,300 lb against nearly 5,000 lb for the gun it replaced, and that saving meant a Chinook could lift the gun, its equipment and a useful load of ammunition in one go.

Batteries could be placed on mountaintops, kept supplied from the air and moved again before the enemy had worked out where they were. The Australian War Memorial holds 1966 photographs of American Chinooks lifting Australian pack howitzers, a reminder that Australia's own gunners relied on the type too, although the Royal Australian Air Force did not receive Chinooks of its own until 1974.

The Chinook also became the Army's breakdown truck. Downed helicopters and light aircraft were rigged up and carried home beneath it, and the figure displayed by Seattle's Museum of Flight, among others, is that Chinooks recovered around 11,500 aircraft during the war, worth more than 3 billion dollars.

It is a number that traces back to Boeing's own publicity rather than to any Army record we could find, and other accounts put it nearer 12,000, so treat it as a very large number rather than an exact one.

Chinook folklore also credits one aircraft with carrying 147 South Vietnamese refugees in a single load during the fall of Saigon in 1975. It is repeated everywhere and confirmed nowhere, with no named aircraft, crew or date, which is usually a sign of a story that has grown in the telling.

What is documented is that South Vietnamese Chinook crews flew their own families out as the country collapsed, some of them ditching beside American ships because there was nowhere left to land.

Guns-A-Go-Go: The Chinook Gunship

In 1965 somebody in the US Army wondered what would happen if you took a helicopter designed to carry thirty-odd soldiers and filled it with guns instead. Boeing Vertol converted four CH-47As into the ACH-47A, known collectively as "Guns-A-Go-Go".

Each carried a pair of fixed 20mm cannon, either rocket pods or 7.62mm miniguns, a 40mm grenade launcher in a chin turret, and heavy machine guns firing from the windows and the rear ramp, together with around a ton of armour plate.

The crews named them "Easy Money", "Stump Jumper", "Birth Control" and "Co$t of Living", the dollar sign being very much part of the name. General John Tolson, who commanded the 1st Cavalry Division, said of the type that though "anything but graceful, it had a tremendous effect on the friendly troops which constantly asked for its support".

The gunships did not have a happy time of it. "Stump Jumper" was wrecked in a ground accident at Vung Tau in 1966. "Co$t of Living" was lost near Bong Son on 5 May 1967 when a mounting pin on one of its 20mm cannon worked loose and the gun swung up and fired into its own forward rotor, killing all eight aboard; some records describe the loss simply as a shoot-down. "Birth Control" was forced down and destroyed by mortar fire near Hue during the Tet Offensive in February 1968.

With only "Easy Money" left, and the purpose-built AH-1 Cobra gunship arriving in numbers, the Army decided that Chinooks were worth more carrying things than shooting at things. "Easy Money", serial 64-13149, survives and is preserved by the US Army in Alabama.

The Chinook Comes to Britain

Britain came close to buying the Chinook twice before it finally did. On 14 March 1967 ministers told the Commons that an order had been placed for fifteen Chinooks to replace the RAF's Bristol Belvedere, itself a tandem-rotor helicopter.

By November the order had been cancelled in that year's defence cuts, saving about £6 million. In 1971 the choice for a new medium-lift helicopter was said in Parliament to lie between the Chinook and the Sikorsky CH-53, and two years later a minister described the Chinook, rather ruefully, as the helicopter "of which we have none".

The breakthrough came in 1978, when the government announced that the RAF would order thirty Chinooks, the figure ministers gave in Parliament that year. By the time the aircraft were built the first batch had grown to thirty-three. The British version, the Chinook HC1, was based on the CH-47C.

The first aircraft reached the United Kingdom in November 1980 and went to the Chinook conversion flight at RAF Odiham in Hampshire, and in August 1981 No. 18 Squadron re-formed as the RAF's first front-line Chinook squadron.

After the Falklands the government ordered eight more, three of them to replace aircraft lost in the war. Between 1992 and 1995 Boeing rebuilt the surviving HC1s to the American CH-47D standard as the HC2, with uprated engines under digital control, and six brand-new HC2As followed from 1997.

Later programmes produced the HC4, HC5 and HC6, the last of them fourteen new-build aircraft based on the CH-47F, the final one delivered in December 2015, and today the fleet is made up of HC5s, HC6s and upgraded HC6As, all with glass cockpits and digital flight controls.

Odiham has been the home of the RAF's Chinook Force ever since. Today it houses Nos. 7, 18(B) and 27 Squadrons, while No. 28 Squadron at RAF Benson trains new support helicopter crews. For the wider story of the service that flies it, see our history of the Royal Air Force.

The Falklands, 1982: Atlantic Conveyor

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, the RAF's young Chinook force was about to face its first war. Five Chinook HC1s of No. 18 Squadron sailed south aboard the requisitioned container ship MV Atlantic Conveyor, which left on 25 April.

One was put ashore at Ascension Island on 5 May, where it stayed for the rest of the war shuttling stores out to the passing ships of the Task Force. The other four went on.

On 25 May 1982 two Argentine Super Étendards fired Exocet missiles at the Task Force, and one of them struck Atlantic Conveyor. Twelve men were lost. So were three of the four Chinooks, six Royal Navy Wessex helicopters, tents for 10,000 men, and the Chinook detachment's spares, tools and manuals.

The official citation for the detachment commander put it plainly: all of No. 18 Squadron's assets, less one Chinook helicopter, were destroyed.

The loss shaped the land campaign. The plan had been to fly troops and guns forward across East Falkland; instead the infantry walked, carrying everything on their backs, and "yomping" entered the language.

The historian Martin Middlebrook judged that the campaign would be severely handicapped by the loss of the Chinooks' load-carrying capacity. Each could lift several times as much as a Sea King.

Bravo November Goes to War

The one Chinook that survived was ZA718, code letters "BN", known ever after as Bravo November. It had been airborne on a test flight when the missile struck, and with its ship ablaze it had nowhere to go but the nearest deck, the carrier HMS Hermes.

According to the RAF Museum, the carrier's captain was not delighted to find a large and unexpected helicopter occupying valuable space, and threatened to push it over the side. After a single night aboard, Bravo November flew to San Carlos Water, where HMS Fearless and the amphibious force were putting the land army ashore.

From 27 May a detachment of two crews and around twenty-seven ground crew under Squadron Leader Dick Langworthy kept it flying from muddy holes in the ground, with no spare parts, no special tools and no maintenance manuals. They had lost every one of those with the ship.

Bravo November carried guns and ammunition forward to 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment around Goose Green, and brought the wounded back to the field hospital at Ajax Bay.

On the night of 30 May it was sent to carry three 105mm light guns, two inside and one slung beneath, with their gunners, to Mount Kent, flying low in the dark on night-vision goggles. The landing site had been described as a flat plateau and turned out to be a slope of loose rock.

Unloading, which should have taken five minutes, took forty, in the dark and within range of the enemy.

On the way back, flying low and fast through a snowstorm, the radar altimeter failed and the Chinook hit the sea at around 100 knots. By rights that should have been the end of it.

The engines partly flamed out, but Langworthy, in the words of his citation, recovered the situation, and the aircraft climbed back out of the water. "We came out of the water like a cork out of a bottle," the co-pilot, Flight Lieutenant Andy Lawless, remembered. "We were climbing!" In the chaos Lawless had jettisoned his cockpit door, and with it went the maps and the codes that identified the aircraft to friendly air defences.

The crew limped home flashing their lights, and one of the crewmen later recalled that a corporal among the Royal Marines gunners held fire at the last moment because he noticed that the approaching Chinook had no door on the left-hand side of the cockpit.

Three days later Bravo November flew one of the most famous lifts in the history of British helicopters. On 2 June 1982, when 2 PARA learned by telephone that the settlement at Fitzroy was clear of the enemy, the battalion seized the chance to leap forward.

Bravo November carried 81 fully equipped paratroopers from Goose Green to Fitzroy in a single lift, roughly twice its normal load, and then went back and brought another 75. Six days later, when the landing ships Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram were bombed at Bluff Cove, it helped carry the wounded to Ajax Bay and on to the hospital ship Uganda.

By the Argentine surrender on 14 June, Bravo November had flown on every day bar one.

Its totals differ depending on who is counting: the RAF Museum gives 2,150 troops, while the Ministry of Defence's figure is around 1,500, along with 95 casualties, somewhere between 550 and 650 prisoners of war, and around 550 tons of stores, a load which the RAF's own history reckoned greater than a whole squadron of Sea Kings had managed over the same period. Langworthy was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

A second RAF Chinook finally arrived in the islands, the Museum records, two hours after the surrender, and the ground crew who had kept Bravo November going were not especially pleased to see it. "We didn't want to be reinforced," said one of them, Tom Kinsella. "We wanted to see this thing through ourselves."

Argentina had Chinooks in the islands too: two CH-47Cs of the Argentine Army. One, AE-521, was destroyed on the ground near Mount Kent by Harriers on 21 May (for more on the jump jet's war, see our history of the Harrier jump jets).

The other, AE-520, was captured intact at Stanley and taken back to Britain as ZH257, where it ended its days as a source of spare parts for the RAF. According to the RAF Museum, 18 Squadron's ground crew also used a door from a captured Argentine Chinook to replace the one Andy Lawless had thrown into the South Atlantic.

Northern Ireland and the Mull of Kintyre, 1994

Chinooks began flying troops in Northern Ireland in 1988, after the IRA's bomb attack on an Army bus at Ballygawley in August that year, when most troop movements were switched from the roads to helicopters. The Chinook detachment at Aldergrove became a familiar part of Operation Banner.

It was from Aldergrove that Chinook HC2 ZD576 took off on the afternoon of Thursday 2 June 1994, bound for Fort George near Inverness.

On board were four crew and twenty-five passengers: senior officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch, Army intelligence officers and officials from the Northern Ireland Office and MI5, many of the most senior figures in Northern Ireland's security and intelligence community, on their way to an annual conference.

At 16:59 GMT, in poor visibility, the aircraft flew into the hillside on the Mull of Kintyre, just uphill from the lighthouse. All twenty-nine aboard were killed. It remains one of the worst peacetime losses in the history of the Royal Air Force.

The RAF Board of Inquiry could not establish the cause with certainty and made no finding of negligence. The two senior officers who reviewed its findings went further, declaring the pilots, Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Richard Cook, "negligent to a gross degree", even though the rules of the day allowed such a finding against dead aircrew only where there was "absolutely no doubt whatsoever".

ZD576 had been delivered to the squadron in its newly upgraded HC2 form only two days before, and questions about the new engine control software, known as FADEC, and about the RAF's handling of the HC2's introduction, would not go away.

A Scottish fatal accident inquiry in 1996 could not determine the cause either and did not agree with the negligence finding, and in 2001 a House of Lords select committee unanimously concluded that the reviewing officers had not been justified. The families spent seventeen years campaigning to clear the two pilots' names.

In 2011 an independent review led by Lord Philip recommended that the finding be set aside, and on 13 July 2011 the Defence Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, told the Commons that it had been, and apologised to the pilots' families. He also noted that Flight Lieutenant Tapper had asked for the passengers to be split between more than one helicopter.

The story has not ended there: the families of most of those who died are still pressing for a full public inquiry, and the question was debated in Westminster Hall as recently as November 2025.

The Gulf, the Balkans and Sierra Leone

In the Gulf War of 1991 RAF Chinooks and Pumas moved supplies and casualties for British land forces, and, according to the RAF Museum, it was a Chinook that carried the SAS patrol Bravo Two Zero into Iraq. As the fighting ended, RAF Chinooks flew from Britain to Turkey, arriving on 13 April 1991, to carry food and shelter to Kurdish refugees in the mountains of northern Iraq.

In the Balkans, Chinooks supported the NATO forces in Bosnia from Split in Croatia, and in June 1999 they flew in paratroopers of 5 Airborne Brigade to secure the Kacanik defile at the start of NATO's entry into Kosovo.

In May 2000 four RAF Chinooks were among the aircraft sent to Sierra Leone for Operation Palliser, evacuating civilians from Freetown to Lungi airport, and that September Chinooks carried soldiers of 1 PARA into the jungle for Operation Barras, the rescue of British soldiers held by the West Side Boys militia.

Eight Helicopters That Could Not Fly in Cloud: The HC3 Affair

Not every chapter of the RAF's Chinook story is a proud one. In 1995 the Ministry of Defence ordered fourteen new Chinooks and decided to modify eight of them as the HC3, a special forces version with bigger fuel tanks, better navigation and night-vision equipment, for £259 million.

The aircraft were delivered in 2001, and then could not be cleared to fly properly.

The trouble was software. The HC3 had a hybrid cockpit of analogue and digital instruments, and to certify it as airworthy the Ministry needed to examine the underlying software code. It had never written access to that code into the contract.

The helicopters were therefore allowed to fly only on clear days, above 500 feet, where the pilot could navigate by landmarks, which is not a great deal of use for a helicopter meant to carry special forces at night.

The Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh, called it "one of the most incompetent procurements of all time", and the Telegraph reported him adding that the Ministry "might as well have bought eight turkeys".

For the next seven years the eight helicopters sat in climate-controlled shelters at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire. A plan to fix them was abandoned in 2007, and instead they were "reverted" to the standard of the RAF's existing HC2s, with the older cockpit, so that they could be sent to Afghanistan.

The first reverted aircraft flew in the summer of 2009. The National Audit Office put the total cost at around £422 million, and the Public Accounts Committee called the whole saga "a catalogue of errors from the start". The eight were later rebuilt again as the HC5 and serve to this day.

Iraq, 2003: Into the Al Faw

In the opening hours of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, RAF Chinooks and Pumas and Royal Navy Sea Kings carried 3 Commando Brigade onto the Al Faw peninsula to secure the peninsula and its oil installations.

When the American helicopters that were meant to lift 42 Commando were grounded after a US Marine Corps helicopter crashed, the operation was re-planned and 42 Commando went in six hours later aboard RAF Chinooks and Pumas. The RAF Museum describes the operation as the largest helicopter assault in RAF history and the first opposed helicopter assault since Suez in 1956. For more on the men who went in, see our history of the Royal Marines Commandos.

One of the pilots that night was Squadron Leader Steve Carr, flying Bravo November, twenty-one years after its Falklands war. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his leadership while landing Royal Marines on the Al Faw under fire.

Afghanistan: The Lifeline of Helmand

When British forces moved into Helmand province in 2006, they found themselves spread across a vast and hostile province with few roads, and those that existed were a favourite hunting ground for the makers of roadside bombs. The Chinook became the thread that held the whole operation together.

It carried troops out to remote patrol bases and brought them home again, lifted in food, water and ammunition, and flew the assaults that opened new operations, often at night and sometimes under fire.

The work was relentless and dangerous. In the summer of 2009 two RAF Chinooks were destroyed in Helmand within a fortnight: one was forced down under fire near Sangin on 19 August and then destroyed by coalition aircraft to keep it out of enemy hands, and a second was wrecked in a hard landing on 30 August.

On both occasions everyone aboard, nineteen people in the second, got out alive. The government ordered new Chinooks to replace them before the year was out. For the wider story of the soldiers the Chinooks carried, see our history of the British Army.

Dust, Heat and Brownouts

Afghanistan's fine dust was a constant enemy. As a Chinook comes in to land, its rotors hurl up a boiling cloud that can swallow the aircraft completely in the last few feet, a condition crews call a "brownout", in which the ground, the horizon and any sense of which way is up vanish at the most critical moment of the flight.

RAF crews trained hard for dust landings and flew them day and night, and the photograph above, taken as a Chinook resupplied the Royal Marines of 42 Commando at Garmsir in February 2007, shows exactly what they were flying into.

The heat was nearly as bad. Hot, thin air robs every helicopter of lift, and in the summer months the Chinook's reserves of power, the very thing that had made it so valuable in the mountains of Afghanistan and the jungles of Vietnam, were what allowed it to go on working when lighter helicopters struggled.

The Flying Emergency Room

In Afghanistan the RAF Chinook became something new: a flying emergency department. The Medical Emergency Response Team, known as the MERT, flew aboard a Chinook kept on standby at Camp Bastion, and typically consisted of a doctor, usually an anaesthetist or emergency medicine consultant, an emergency nurse and two paramedics, with a force protection team from the RAF Regiment.

Because the Chinook's cabin was big enough to work in, treatment began the moment the casualty came up the ramp, rather than when they reached hospital.

The Imperial War Museum's oral histories preserve the voices of the people who did it. "It's intense, it's hot, it's noisy and you've got to perform," recalled Peter Mahoney, a MERT anaesthetist, describing the moment of landing: "ramp down, cloud of dust".

Jonathan Rockingham Smith, one of the early Chinook pilots, remembered that in 2006 the medical kit "was basically a stretcher, a couple of rucksacks and an oxygen bottle, and that was it". Another crewman, Michael Fry, said that checks which would normally take twenty to twenty-five minutes were done in six or seven, "and you'd be gone".

The toll of what they did is hard to count exactly, but one published study found that the MERT treated almost 7,000 patients between April 2006 and September 2013. A great many soldiers, Afghans and civilians alike, are alive today because of it.

Bravo November's Distinguished Flying Crosses

Bravo November served in Afghanistan too, and added to a record that no other RAF helicopter can match. On 29 January 2010, according to later accounts, Flight Lieutenant Ian Fortune was flying it with the Immediate Response Team to collect six casualties, two of them critically injured, when a bullet struck his helmet visor.

With his face cut and the aircraft's flight stabilisation system knocked out, he picked up the casualties and flew them back to Camp Bastion, and all six survived. "I said: 'Chaps, I think I've been shot but I'm OK,'" he told the Ministry of Defence afterwards. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

That made three Distinguished Flying Crosses won by pilots at the controls of the same airframe: Langworthy in the Falklands in 1982, Carr in Iraq in 2003 and Fortune in Afghanistan in 2010. You will often read that there were four, with the fourth going to Flight Lieutenant Craig Wilson for his work in Afghanistan in 2006.

Wilson certainly won the DFC, and the RAF Museum's own press release in 2022 said that four of Bravo November's pilots had been awarded it, but the Museum's collection record and its curator both list three, leaving Wilson out. Three or four, it is a remarkable record for a helicopter that was only saved from the bottom of the South Atlantic by a test flight.

Bravo November served for almost forty years, from the Falklands through Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, ending its career as a modernised HC6A. On 16 March 2022 it left RAF Odiham on the back of a low-loader for the RAF Museum at Cosford in Shropshire, where it was unveiled six days later, in time for the fortieth anniversary of the Falklands War.

America's Chinooks: Desert Storm to the Bin Laden Raid

The Chinook's finest logistical hour came in February 1991, when the 101st Airborne Division opened the ground war against Iraq by seizing Forward Operating Base Cobra, around 90 miles inside Iraq. Some 60 Chinooks and more than 120 Black Hawks carried the assault, one of the largest air assaults ever mounted.

The site had been chosen, in part, because it lay within the combat radius of a fully loaded CH-47D, and by the end of the first day the Chinooks had flown in around 131,000 gallons of fuel along with pallets of ammunition. It is not often that a helicopter decides where a battle is fought.

Afghanistan made the Chinook indispensable. Many American bases sat above 10,000 feet in the Hindu Kush, where thin air robs every helicopter of lift, and the Chinook's power and 20,000 ft ceiling made it one of the very few aircraft that could keep them supplied with a useful load.

Crews became expert at "pinnacle" landings, holding the aircraft in a hover with only the rear wheels or the ramp resting on a ridge while troops scrambled on or off a mountainside with no landing site at all.

The cost was heavy. On the night of 3 to 4 March 2002, during Operation Anaconda, two special forces MH-47Es tried to put troops on the 10,500 ft summit of Takur Ghar.

The first was riddled with fire; Navy SEAL Neil Roberts fell from its ramp, and the pilot nursed the crippled aircraft several miles away to a forced landing. The second was shot down on the summit while bringing in a rescue force, and seven Americans died in the battle that followed.

There is a curious postscript in the US Army's own history of the recovery: the damaged MH-47E was stranded at around 9,000 ft, too high and too heavy for another Chinook to lift safely, so the Army hired a Russian Mi-26, the largest helicopter in the world, to carry it out. It was rebuilt and returned to service.

Some of the worst single losses American forces suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan were Chinook shoot-downs. A CH-47D carrying soldiers going on leave was hit by a missile near Fallujah on 2 November 2003, killing sixteen.

On 28 June 2005 an MH-47 known as Turbine 33 was brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade during Operation Red Wings in Kunar province, killing all sixteen aboard, eight Navy SEALs and eight soldiers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. And on 6 August 2011 a CH-47D with the call sign Extortion 17 was hit by an RPG over the Tangi Valley in Wardak province.

Thirty Americans, seven Afghan commandos and an Afghan interpreter were killed, along with a military working dog, the heaviest single loss of American life in the whole Afghan war. The official US Army investigation found that the aircraft was brought down by enemy fire and that the decisions leading up to the flight were tactically sound.

The Chinook's great virtue, carrying a great many people at once, is also what makes each loss so terrible.

The Chinook also played a part in the most famous helicopter raid of modern times. When US Navy SEALs attacked Osama bin Laden's compound at Abbottabad in Pakistan on 2 May 2011, MH-47s waited in reserve at a refuelling point inside Pakistan.

After one of the stealth-modified Black Hawks crashed in the compound, a Chinook flew in to bring the assault force home. It had been planned as the back-up; it ended up finishing the job.

A Chinook for Twenty Nations

Boeing lists twenty countries besides the United States that have bought the H-47, and several more flew it in the past. Some of the stories are well worth telling.

Italy gave the Chinook its first overseas production line. Elicotteri Meridionali acquired the licence for the CH-47C in 1968 and began building in 1970, both for the Italian Army and for export, and many of the Chinooks flown by Iran, Libya, Morocco, Egypt and Greece came from Italian factories rather than American ones.

Japan is by some distance the largest operator outside the United States. Kawasaki Heavy Industries has built the CH-47J and the improved CH-47JA under licence since the mid-1980s, and delivered its hundredth aircraft to the Japanese Ground and Air Self-Defence Forces in January 2017.

Japan has since ordered seventeen more to the new Block II standard.

Iran bought around ninety Italian-built CH-47Cs before the 1979 revolution, and has kept many of them flying since, largely by making its own spares. In the summer of 1978 four Imperial Iranian Air Force Chinooks strayed across the border into Soviet Turkmenistan.

A Soviet MiG-23 shot one down, killing its crew of eight, and damaged a second so badly that it landed on Soviet soil. In a rare moment of Cold War tact, the Soviets let the Iranians repair it and fly it home, and released its crew.

Iranian Chinooks went on to fly throughout the Iran-Iraq war, and lost at least eight aircraft doing so.

Canada has had one of the more roundabout relationships with the type. It bought CH-147 Chinooks in the 1970s, sold seven of them to the Netherlands in 1993 to save money, and then found in Afghanistan that it badly needed heavy helicopters to get troops off roads riddled with roadside bombs.

In 2008 it bought six ex-US Army CH-47Ds already in theatre, and then ordered fifteen new CH-147Fs, the last of which reached 450 Tactical Helicopter Squadron at Petawawa, Ontario, in 2014.

The Netherlands, having started with those ex-Canadian aircraft, now flies twenty CH-47Fs with 298 Squadron, "the Grizzlies", at Gilze-Rijen and on a training detachment in Texas. The squadron's motto, Nihil nobis nimium, translates as "Nothing is too much for us", which could be the Chinook's own.

In August 2025 the Dutch sent two Chinooks to help fight wildfires in Spain.

India bought fifteen CH-47F(I)s, delivered in 2019 and 2020, and put them to work almost at once on the Siachen Glacier and in Ladakh, carrying heavy equipment to some of the highest military positions on earth. Australia, whose first CH-47Cs arrived in 1974, now flies fourteen CH-47Fs with the Army's 5th Aviation Regiment at Townsville. Singapore sent eight Chinooks to help after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, one of the largest national helicopter contributions to the relief effort.

And Germany has placed the largest order in the type's history. In a programme funded from the special defence fund created after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Berlin is buying sixty CH-47F Block IIs to replace the Luftwaffe's elderly CH-53Gs.

Final assembly of the first German Chinook began in Pennsylvania in April 2026, with deliveries planned from 2027 to 2033. Ukraine never received Chinooks of its own; in a roundabout way, it persuaded Europe to buy them instead.

Not every overseas story is a happy one. Thailand's small fleet of CH-47Ds proved so expensive to keep flying that most were grounded for lack of spares, and when the Royal Thai Army tried to sell them second-hand, nobody bought them. A Chinook is a wonderful thing to own, provided you can afford to feed it.

The Commercial Chinook and the Sumburgh Disaster

Boeing built a civil version, the Model 234 Commercial Chinook, and its launch customer was British. British Airways Helicopters put it into service from Aberdeen in July 1981, flying oil workers to the North Sea platforms, and eventually operated six.

Only thirteen were ever built, and operators found it too big for some contracts and too heavy for many of the rigs it was meant to serve.

On 6 November 1986 a Boeing 234LR, registration G-BWFC, operated by British International Helicopters (as British Airways Helicopters had become), was bringing oil workers home from the Brent field when it crashed into the sea two and a half miles short of Sumburgh Airport in Shetland. Forty-five of the forty-seven people aboard were killed.

Only the captain and one passenger survived, both pulled from the water by a Coastguard helicopter that had just taken off from Sumburgh.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch found that a modified gear in the forward transmission had failed, allowing the two rotors to fall out of synchronisation so that their blades collided. It remains the deadliest civil helicopter accident in British history.

The Chinook's career as a North Sea airliner did not survive it, although Norway's Helikopter Service kept flying the type offshore for some years. Today the Model 234's type certificate belongs to Columbia Helicopters of Oregon, whose civil Chinooks now earn their living lifting logs, building power lines and fighting fires.

Floods, Fires and a Failing Dam: The Chinook at Home

Some of the Chinook's most important work in Britain has had nothing to do with war. On 1 August 2019 part of the concrete spillway of Toddbrook Reservoir, above the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge, collapsed after heavy rain, and around 1,500 people were evacuated from their homes in case the dam gave way.

An RAF Chinook, with crews from Nos. 18 and 27 Squadrons and the Joint Helicopter Support Squadron handling the loads on the ground, spent the following days dropping giant bags of aggregate into the breach, guided by grids spray-painted on the damaged spillway.

More than 300 tonnes went in on the Friday alone. "It's not something that we are trained to do," admitted one of the crewmen, Sergeant Oli Squire, which rather undersold how well they did it. The dam held, and the two squadrons were honoured at the Millies military awards later that year.

Earlier that summer two Chinooks and a Puma had dropped 342 one-tonne bags of gravel to plug a breached river bank at Wainfleet in Lincolnshire. During the floods of December 2015 a Chinook carried power generators to the flood barrier on the River Foss in York and helped repair defences at Croston in Lancashire.

Chinooks have carried fodder and supplies to snowbound farms, and during the Covid-19 pandemic they flew NHS paramedics, equipment and patients as part of the military's support to the health service.

Firefighting is the newest string to the RAF Chinook's bow. The Chinooks of No. 1310 Flight at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus carry a "Bambi" bucket that holds around five tonnes of water, and in July 2025 they dropped 450 tonnes of it on what was described as the island's worst wildfire for generations.

By 2026 the Flight had declared a formal firefighting capability and holds aircraft on an hour's notice through the summer. "From sunrise to sunset, we hold a readiness state of 60 minutes' notice," its commanding officer, Squadron Leader Joel Babbage, told Forces News. The photograph above shows one of those crews training off the Cypriot coast in July 2026.

Not every mercy mission goes to plan. After the Nepal earthquake of April 2015, three RAF Chinooks were flown out to help, only for the Nepalese government not to grant them clearance.

They spent around a month waiting at Chandigarh in northern India before being brought home, at a cost of about £3 million, having never turned a rotor in Nepal.

Arctic Snow and Mountain Air

The Chinook's power reserves make it at home in places where air is thin and cold. Each winter RAF crews train in northern Norway on Operation Clockwork, flying from Bardufoss inside the Arctic Circle alongside the Royal Norwegian Air Force.

For landing on deep snow the Chinook can be fitted with wheel skis, broad red pads bolted to its landing gear to stop it sinking, as the No. 18 Squadron aircraft in the photograph above wears in February 2026.

Mountain flying is just as demanding. The photograph at the top of this article was taken in the Pyrenees in May 2023 on Exercise Tusker Raptor, where RAF crews practise landing and hovering in high, cold terrain.

It is the same skill that American crews needed at 10,000 feet in the Hindu Kush and Indian crews need today on the Siachen Glacier. In thin air every helicopter loses lift, and it is here that the Chinook's two rotors and two big engines earn their keep.

The Future: Block II, the H-47ER and the 2030s

The RAF's next Chinooks are already being built. In April 2021 the government announced that it would buy fourteen new H-47 Extended Range aircraft, based on the American Block II with larger fuel tanks and an air-to-air refuelling probe, and intended mainly for special forces work.

The deal was finalised in March 2024. Its price has moved about: £1.4 billion when it was announced, around £2 billion in the then Defence Secretary's words, and a budget limit of £1.85 billion approved in June 2024, the latest official figure.

The first aircraft was rolled out at Boeing's Ridley Park factory in Pennsylvania in 2026, painted all black in the manner of the US Army's special operations Chinooks.

Deliveries have slipped more than once. The 2021 plan spoke of deliveries starting in 2026; the Ministry of Defence now says the aircraft will be in service from late 2027, while Janes reports deliveries running from 2028 to 2032.

Meanwhile the Defence Investment Plan of 2026 said that all 29 of the RAF's older HC6A Chinooks would be retired by 2030, leaving the fleet temporarily smaller, with a second batch of new Chinooks planned for delivery from the mid-2030s. The shrinking has already begun: the Ministry's own statistics counted 59 Chinooks in 2023 and 45 on 1 April 2026.

The organisation that runs Britain's battlefield helicopters has changed too: the Joint Helicopter Command became the Joint Aviation Command on 1 April 2024.

Across the Atlantic the US Army has been ordering Block II aircraft in small batches, with twenty-four under contract by April 2026, and in 2016 it spoke of flying the Chinook through the 2060s, which would take the type to its hundredth birthday. Its most recent budget papers are a little more cautious, describing the CH-47F as the Army's heavy-lift helicopter until the late 2030s.

Either way, with Germany's sixty aircraft still to be delivered and new orders from Japan and elsewhere, the sound of two rotors beating out of step is not going away any time soon.

Why the Chinook Still Matters

Aircraft usually become legends by being fast, beautiful or deadly. The Chinook is none of those things, or at least not on purpose. It became a legend by turning up.

It turned up on Mount Kent in a snowstorm with no spares and no manual, on an Afghan hillside in a cloud of dust with a surgeon in the back, on a crumbling dam in Derbyshire with a tonne of gravel on a hook, and it has been doing so for more than sixty years.

Like the Avro Lancaster before it, it has become part of the national furniture, a sound that people recognise before they look up. Our collection of Chinook photo prints covers the type from Helmand to the Arctic: Chinooks alongside the Puma, a Chinook being intercepted by a Typhoon, a Chinook lifting a Royal Marines raiding boat, Royal Marines fast-roping from the ramp, and RAF Chinooks on ceremonial flypasts over London.

Every photograph in this article is available as a print, along with the rest of our RAF helicopter prints.