Hunter, Rescuer, Junglie, Bagger: The Story of the Westland Sea King

For almost half a century, if someone was in trouble on a British mountainside, in a storm off the coast or on a sinking ship, there was a good chance that the thing clattering towards them out of the murk was a Sea King. For the Royal Navy it hunted submarines, carried Royal Marines into battle and watched the skies over the fleet.

For the RAF it was the big yellow rescue helicopter that every British child could draw. It served in the Falklands, the Gulf, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of its pilots was a future King.

It was also, strictly speaking, an American helicopter. The Sea King was designed by Sikorsky in Connecticut, and Westland of Yeovil built it under licence, but by the time Westland had finished with it, with British engines, British electronics and British sonar, it had become as British as a flask of tea on a cold flight deck.

It flew in British military service from 1969 until September 2018, a remarkable forty-nine years.

This is the Sea King's story: where it came from, how it was built, its many marks and specifications, its wars and rescues, the operators around the world who flew it, and its long goodbye.

Every fact has been checked against at least two independent sources, among them Westland's own heritage records, the Royal Navy, the RAF Museum, the Ministry of Defence, the US Navy's historians and the specialist aviation press. Where respected sources disagree, we say so.

An American Design: Sikorsky's Sea King, 1959

The Sea King began life as the Sikorsky HSS-2, built for the US Navy to hunt submarines. The prototype first flew at Stratford, Connecticut, on 11 March 1959, with Sikorsky's test pilot Robert Decker at the controls.

It entered US Navy service in 1961, and in 1962, when the American services tidied up their designations, the HSS-2 became the SH-3A. Sikorsky's own company number for the family was S-61.

What made it special was that it did two jobs in one airframe. Earlier anti-submarine helicopters had usually worked in pairs, one carrying the sensors to find the submarine and the other carrying the weapons to attack it. The Sea King could hunt and kill on its own.

It had two turbine engines, General Electric T58s, which gave it far more power and safety than the piston-engined helicopters before it, and a boat-shaped hull with float sponsons so that it could, in an emergency, settle on the water.

Counting the family's total production is harder than it sounds. According to the Sikorsky Archives, Sikorsky built 794 S-61s and licensed factories in Britain, Italy, Canada and Japan built 679 more, which makes about 1,473. Other histories, counting only the military versions, give figures nearer 1,100.

Either way, it is one of the most successful large helicopters ever built.

Made in Yeovil: The Westland Licence

Westland Aircraft had already built American Sikorsky designs under licence, turning the S-55 into the Whirlwind and the S-58 into the Wessex, and it took a licence for the S-61 in 1959. The Royal Navy needed a successor to the Wessex as its anti-submarine helicopter, and in 1966 it placed its order with Westland.

The RAF Museum puts that first order at 60 aircraft; other histories give 56, the number of HAS1s that Westland built.

Westland bought four airframes from Sikorsky to act as patterns and converted them to the British standard. The first, XV370, arrived by sea in October 1966, and Westland's chief test pilot, Slim Sear, flew it from the docks at Bristol to Yeovil. The changes Westland made were substantial.

The American T58 engines gave way to Rolls-Royce Gnomes, a British-built development of the same engine, with their own fuel and control systems.

A British search radar went into a hump on the back of the fuselage, a Plessey dipping sonar went into the cabin, and the helicopter received a new automatic flight control system, developed with the British firm Louis Newmark, which could hold it in a steady hover over the sea at night and in foul weather while the sonar was lowered into the water.

The result was an aircraft that looked like an American Sea King but was, underneath, very largely British. Westland's own records say that 330 Sea Kings of all versions were built at Yeovil between 1968 and 1990; other sources, including the company's successor, Leonardo, give "over 340", and some put the last deliveries in the mid-1990s. The honest answer is somewhere between 330 and 344.

First Flights and Into Service, 1969 to 1970

The first Westland-built Sea King HAS1, XV642, flew at Yeovil on 7 May 1969. That August, a few weeks after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the first aircraft were delivered to 700S Naval Air Squadron, the intensive flying trials unit at RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall, which would remain the Sea King's spiritual home for the next half century.

On 24 February 1970, 824 Naval Air Squadron re-formed at Culdrose as the first front-line Sea King squadron, and that summer it embarked in the carrier HMS Ark Royal for the type's first operational deployment.

The Royal Navy liked what it had. The Sea King could stay out longer, carry more and fly in worse weather than anything it had flown before. It carried up to four torpedoes or depth charges, and with its sonar, radar and a crew of up to four it was a complete submarine-hunting system in its own right.

It was also, as generations of aircrew would discover, rather good at almost everything else.

Westland Sea King Specifications at a Glance

The figures below are for the Royal Navy's later anti-submarine Sea Kings, the HAS5 and HAS6, unless stated, from Westland, the Royal Navy and the specialist press. Where the sources disagree, the range is given.

Crew: up to four in the anti-submarine role, pilots, an observer and an aircrewman; two pilots and an aircrewman in the Commando HC4.

Main rotor diameter: 18.9 m (62 ft), with five blades on the main rotor and five on the tail rotor.

Length: 22.15 m (72 ft 8 in) with the rotors turning; the fuselage alone is 16.7 to 17.0 m (about 55 to 56 ft).

Height: 4.7 to 5.1 m (15 ft 6 in to 16 ft 10 in), depending on how it is measured.

Maximum take-off weight: 9,525 kg (21,000 lb) for earlier marks, rising to 9,707 kg (21,400 lb).

Engines: two Rolls-Royce Gnome turboshafts: the H1400 of about 1,500 shp in the first HAS1s, and the uprated H1400-1 and later versions of up to about 1,660 shp (1,238 kW) each.

Maximum speed: about 113 knots (209 km/h, 130 mph), with a cruising speed only a knot or so slower.

Range: about 1,230 km (664 nautical miles, 764 miles) as a ferry range.

Service ceiling: 10,000 to 12,000 ft (3,050 to 3,660 m); sources differ.

Capacity: the Commando HC4 carried 27 or 28 fully equipped troops, depending on the source, or an underslung load of about 2.5 tonnes, enough for a Land Rover or a 105 mm light gun.

Armament: in the anti-submarine role, up to four Mk 44, Mk 46 or Sting Ray torpedoes, or depth charges; in the Commando role, a door-mounted machine gun.

Built: about 330 to 344 at Yeovil from 1968, for the Royal Navy, the RAF and eight overseas customers.

British service: 1969 to 2018.

From HAS1 to ASaC7: The Many Marks of Sea King

Few British aircraft have come in so many flavours. The first 56 anti-submarine HAS1s were followed by the HAS2, 21 of them new-built and more converted from HAS1s, with more powerful engines and a stronger gearbox.

In 1981 came the HAS5, 30 new-built and about 55 converted, with a much larger radome for its Sea Searcher radar and the processing equipment to listen through sonobuoys dropped into the sea as well as its own dipping sonar. The final anti-submarine version, the HAS6, followed in the late 1980s with a better sonar on a longer cable, and it hunted submarines until the Merlin took over the role in the early 2000s.

A few HAS6s were then stripped of their sonar and used as troop carriers, known as the HAS6(CR), until March 2010, and Sea Kings with their sonar removed became the Royal Navy's HU5 search and rescue aircraft.

The RAF ordered its own search and rescue version, the HAR3, in 1975: 15 at first and four more later, 19 in all. The first, XZ585, flew on 6 September 1977, and the type entered service in 1978, replacing the Whirlwind and the Wessex.

Six new HAR3As followed in the mid-1990s to replace the last RAF Wessex rescue helicopters.

The Commando HC4, built to carry Royal Marines, first flew in 1979. It was developed from Westland's land-based Commando, which had been sold to Egypt, and it dropped the anti-submarine equipment and the float sponsons in favour of fixed landing gear, a big cabin and a strong hook for underslung loads.

Most sources agree that 42 were built. The last two marks, the AEW2 and the ASaC7, carried a large radar in an inflatable dome on the side of the fuselage. Their story, which began with a disaster in the Falklands, is told below.

Hunting Submarines: The Cold War at Sea

The Sea King's first and most important job was the one it was bought for: finding Soviet submarines. Through the Cold War the Royal Navy's great task, in any war with the Soviet Union, was to hold the gap between Greenland, Iceland and Britain, through which the Soviet Northern Fleet's submarines would have to pass to reach the Atlantic convoys.

The three Invincible-class carriers, Invincible, Illustrious and Ark Royal, were designed around that mission, and their main weapon was a squadron of anti-submarine Sea Kings.

The work was patient, tiring and repetitive. A Sea King would come to a hover a few dozen feet above the sea, often in the dark and in heavy weather, lower its sonar body into the water on a cable, listen, winch it up, and move on to the next spot to listen again.

The automatic flight control system did much of the hovering, which was just as well, because a pilot hand-flying a steady hover over a black sea at night is a pilot with a great deal on his mind. Squadrons including 814, 819, 820, 824 and 826 flew from carriers, from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's support ships and from air stations at Culdrose in Cornwall and Prestwick in Scotland.

The photograph above shows another part of the work: a Sea King refuelling in the hover from the flight deck of RFA Argus, the Navy's aviation training ship, which let a helicopter stay on task without landing.

No Sea King ever sank a Soviet submarine, which was exactly the point. The Cold War at sea was won by making sure the other side knew it would be found. One of the Navy's photographs from 1999 shows a Sea King HAS6 lowering its sonar into the sea, the manoeuvre that crews practised thousands of times.

The Junglies: Commando Sea Kings

The green Sea King HC4s of the Commando Helicopter Force were known throughout the services as "Junglies". The name is often said to come from their green paint, but it is much older than that.

It dates from the 1960s, when the Navy's Commando squadrons, flying Whirlwinds and Wessex, supported British forces in the jungles of Borneo, and it passed down to each new generation of Commando helicopter and its crews.

The HC4 squadrons, 845, 846 and 848 Naval Air Squadrons, were based at RNAS Yeovilton in Somerset, HMS Heron, just up the road from the Westland factory that built their aircraft.

Their job was to carry 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines wherever it went, whether that meant landing troops from a ship, lifting guns and vehicles under the aircraft, or flying through the Arctic winter on the Marines' annual training in northern Norway.

Their crews prided themselves on being able to operate from almost anywhere, with the minimum of support, and the roll-call of places they served reads like a list of every British operation of the late twentieth century. Our collection includes a Sea King HC4 inserting Royal Marines into the forest of Ghana in 2004, one of the more unusual places a Junglie turned up. The story of the men they carried is told in our history of the Royal Marines Commandos.

The Falklands, 1982

When the Task Force sailed for the South Atlantic in April 1982, Sea Kings sailed with it in large numbers. The anti-submarine HAS5s of 826 Naval Air Squadron and the Commando HC4s of 846 Squadron went south in the flagship HMS Hermes, and 820 Squadron's HAS5s went in Invincible.

A new squadron, 825, was formed in a hurry from training aircraft and sent south in merchant ships. The anti-submarine squadrons flew round the clock, screening the carriers against the Argentine submarines, while the Junglies moved troops, stores and guns.

The war's first British death came before the fighting had even begun. On the night of 23 to 24 April, Petty Officer Aircrewman Kevin "Ben" Casey of 846 Squadron was killed when his Sea King went into the sea in bad weather while moving stores near Hermes, south-west of Ascension Island. Worse was to come.

Just after midnight on 18 May, an HC4, ZA290, stripped down for range, flew from Invincible carrying a small SAS team for a secret mission against the Argentine mainland. It ended its flight near Punta Arenas in southern Chile, where the crew set it on fire.

The pilot, Lieutenant Richard Hutchings of the Royal Marines, later told a press conference in Santiago that the helicopter had developed a fault on a routine patrol, which was not true.

The next evening, 19 May, another HC4, ZA294, was cross-decking soldiers from Hermes to the assault ship HMS Intrepid when it crashed into the sea. Twenty-two men were killed, eighteen of them from the SAS, the others including a Royal Signals soldier, an RAF man and members of the crew; nine survived.

It was the SAS's worst single day since the Second World War. Feathers were found in the water, and the loss is usually put down to a bird strike, possibly an albatross, but that was never proven.

Among the Sea King pilots of 820 Squadron was a young sub-lieutenant who was also the Queen's second son, Prince Andrew. In 1982 he said that one of his tasks had been to act as a decoy for Exocet missiles aimed at the carriers; interviewed again in 2001, he called it "a moot point" and said he had never seen a missile go past.

Sea Kings of the task force also plucked survivors from the sea after the losses of the Atlantic Conveyor and of HMS Coventry.

Sir Galahad and Bluff Cove, 8 June 1982

The Sea King's finest hour of the war came on its darkest day. On 8 June 1982 Argentine aircraft bombed the landing ships Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram at Port Pleasant, off Fitzroy, while troops of the Welsh Guards were still aboard Sir Galahad waiting to go ashore. The ship caught fire, and ammunition began to explode.

Four Sea Kings and a Wessex flew straight into the thick black smoke. Hovering over a burning ship full of exploding ammunition, their crews winched men off the decks and out of the water, and when life rafts began to drift back towards the blazing hull, the pilots used the downdraught from their rotors to push them clear.

Aircraft of 825 Squadron were the first on the scene. Forty-eight men died aboard Sir Galahad, thirty-two of them Welsh Guardsmen, but many more survived who would not have done without the helicopters.

The squadron's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Hugh Clark, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross; his logbook for the day reads simply: "Combat operations. SAR RFA Sir Galahad."

The "Bagger": Airborne Early Warning Born of a War

The Falklands also exposed a hole in the fleet's defences that the Sea King would fill. When the last of the Navy's big carriers had gone in 1978, it took with it the Gannet radar aircraft that had given the fleet warning of low-flying attackers.

The fleet had no aircraft to look down on low-flying raiders from above, and on 4 May 1982 an Exocet missile fired by an Argentine aircraft struck the destroyer HMS Sheffield, and she was lost.

Within a week, work had begun on a solution. A feasibility study started on 10 May, and engineers took the Searchwater radar from the RAF's Nimrod maritime patrol programme, put it in an inflatable dome on a swinging arm on the side of a Sea King HAS2, and swung it down beneath the aircraft to search, raising it again for landing.

The first conversion, XV704, flew in its new form on 23 July, and on 2 August it and a second aircraft, XV650, sailed south in the newly completed Illustrious. It had taken around eleven weeks.

They arrived after the fighting had ended, which is why the popular story that radar Sea Kings fought in the Falklands is wrong, but they had proved the idea.

Crews called the radar dome "the bag", and the aircraft became the "Bagger". A small production fleet of around ten AEW2s followed, and in the early 2000s they were upgraded to the ASaC7, with the more capable Searchwater 2000 radar and a new mission system.

The ASaC7 could track vehicles moving on the ground as well as aircraft in the sky, and that would turn out to matter a great deal. The shop's collection includes an AEW2 of 849 Naval Air Squadron in 2007, radar dome raised, preparing to rejoin Illustrious.

Yellow Helicopters: RAF Search and Rescue

For most people in Britain, the Sea King was the big yellow rescue helicopter. The RAF's HAR3s entered service in 1978, the first of them with D Flight of No. 202 Squadron at Lossiemouth that August, and they were soon flying from bases around the coast of Britain, with the squadrons' flights at places such as Boulmer, Leconfield, Chivenor, Valley and Lossiemouth.

The RAF's Sea King training unit, which became No. 203(R) Squadron, moved to RAF Valley on Anglesey in 2008. Our collection of RAF helicopter prints includes many of these yellow Sea Kings at work.

They were military aircraft, kept to rescue downed aircrew in war, but in peacetime almost all their work was for civilians: climbers with broken legs, fishermen in sinking boats, walkers lost in cloud, and the victims of floods.

During the Boscastle floods in Cornwall on 16 August 2004, Sea Kings from the RAF at Chivenor and St Mawgan and the Royal Navy at Culdrose, working with a Coastguard helicopter, lifted dozens of people from rooftops, trees and cars as the village was swept by a wall of water.

On the night of 31 January 2008 the ferry Riverdance was driven aground on the beach near Blackpool in a gale, and Sea King crews winched everyone off her in the dark. The pilot of the RAF Sea King, Flight Lieutenant Lee Turner, was awarded the Air Force Cross.

The RAF's rescue Sea Kings stood down one base at a time in 2015, as the service was handed over to civilian helicopters run by Bristow Helicopters for HM Coastguard. The last to go was A Flight of No. 22 Squadron at Chivenor in Devon, which was relieved at 1300 on 4 October 2015.

By the RAF's own count its rescue crews had answered 34,025 call-outs and rescued 26,853 people since records began in 1983, the great majority in Sea Kings. In the Falkland Islands, RAF Sea Kings carried on a little longer, as in a photograph of a Sea King winching over Mount Pleasant in 2007.

Navy Rescue: Culdrose and HMS Gannet

The Royal Navy ran rescue helicopters too. From 1988, 771 Naval Air Squadron at Culdrose flew grey-and-red Sea Kings over the south-west, the Channel and the Western Approaches, as in a photograph of one winching on the Cornish coast in 2004. Culdrose's crews already had a long record.

In the storm that struck the Fastnet yacht race in August 1979, helicopters from Culdrose, Sea Kings and Wessex together, flew for hours on end in the gale, and by Forces News's count they rescued 75 sailors.

Two years later, on 19 December 1981, a Culdrose Sea King flown by Lieutenant Commander Russell Smith reached the coaster Union Star off Lamorna in a hurricane but could not get close enough to lift anyone off; he then watched the Penlee lifeboat Solomon Browne go in again and again.

All sixteen people aboard the two vessels, including the eight lifeboatmen, were lost. "The greatest act of courage that I have ever seen," Smith said of the lifeboat crew.

In Scotland, the Navy's rescue flight at HMS Gannet, the old air station at Prestwick, covered the mountains and seas of the west. It was frequently the busiest search and rescue base in Britain: in 2009 alone it answered 447 call-outs, about a fifth of all the military rescue work in the country.

Navy rescue ended on 1 January 2016, when Bristow took over, and 771 Squadron disbanded that March. Our collection includes a Gannet Sea King's farewell flypast past the Wallace Monument.

Flight Lieutenant Wales: Prince William at RAF Valley

The most famous Sea King pilot of all was Flight Lieutenant William Wales, better known as Prince William. After training at RAF Valley with No. 203(R) Squadron, the Sea King conversion unit, he graduated as a search and rescue pilot on 16 September 2010, and on 21 September he joined C Flight of No. 22 Squadron at Valley.

The photograph above was taken in between, on 17 September 2010, during Exercise Yellow Scorpion, a joint rescue exercise between a 203 Squadron Sea King and the RNLI, with the newly qualified prince at the controls.

His first rescue came on 2 October 2010, when he flew as co-pilot of Rescue 122 to collect a gas-rig worker who had suffered a suspected heart attack in Morecambe Bay and flew him to hospital in Blackpool. The most dramatic came on the night of 26 to 27 November 2011, when the cargo ship Swanland broke up and sank in a storm in the Irish Sea.

William's crew winched two Russian sailors out of the water; six of their shipmates were lost. By the time he finished his last shift at 0930 on 10 September 2013, Kensington Palace said, he had flown on 156 search and rescue operations and helped rescue 149 people.

The Gulf, Bosnia and Sierra Leone, 1991 to 2000

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Junglies went to the Gulf. In the war of 1991 Commando Sea Kings served ashore with the helicopter force supporting British troops in the desert, where sand, heat and featureless ground made flying hard work for aircraft and crews alike.

Through the 1990s Junglies flew in the former Yugoslavia, supporting British and United Nations troops and then the NATO forces that policed the peace in Bosnia. The photograph above, of an 845 Squadron HC4 in a striking striped winter camouflage and bearing the IFOR markings of the NATO peace force, lifting a light gun in the snow, comes from that time.

In May 2000, when Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, was threatened by rebels, Sea Kings flew from the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean in support of the British operation that restored order.

Iraq, 2003: Al Faw and a Tragedy over the Gulf

In the opening hours of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the helicopter assault that put 3 Commando Brigade onto the Al Faw peninsula was carried by RAF Chinooks, with Navy Sea Kings flying from Ocean and the later Ark Royal.

As our story of the Chinook tells, the Chinooks' enormous capacity made them the obvious choice for the first wave; "220 Marines in four aircraft," one aviator said, "it would have taken 22 Sea Kings". The Sea Kings carried on moving men and supplies once the Marines were ashore.

That campaign brought the Baggers their worst day. At about 0130 GMT on 22 March 2003, two ASaC7s of 849 Squadron collided over the northern Gulf, a few miles from Ark Royal, during a handover between patrols.

All seven men aboard were killed: Lieutenants Philip Green, Antony King, Marc Lawrence, Philip West, James Williams and Andrew Wilson of the Royal Navy, and Lieutenant Thomas Adams of the US Navy, an exchange officer. It was not enemy action.

According to air-safety records, the two aircraft were XV650 and XV704, the very pair that had been rushed into service as the first radar Sea Kings in 1982.

Afghanistan, 2007 to 2014

In Afghanistan the Sea King did two quite different jobs. From 2007 the Junglies of 845 and 846 Squadrons flew from Camp Bastion in Helmand, and their upgraded HC4+ aircraft, with new rotor blades, extra door guns, better defensive systems and night-vision equipment, carried troops and supplies across the province.

By the time they flew their last mission in October 2011, the Ministry of Defence said, they had flown more than 3,800 missions and about 12,500 hours, carried more than 80,000 people and delivered more than 700 tonnes of supplies. Our collection includes a Sea King HC4 of 845 Squadron over Camp Bastion in 2011.

The Baggers went too. From 2009 the ASaC7s of 854 and 857 Squadrons flew over Helmand as "flying radar stations", using their radar to track vehicles moving across the desert at night and guide troops to them.

By July 2011 they had flown their thousandth mission, and one interception alone seized about 1,200 kg of wet opium. They stayed until 2014, and one is pictured over the desert in our print of a Sea King Mk7 over Afghanistan in 2011.

The Junglies, meanwhile, kept their desert skills sharp after coming home, as in the photograph above, taken in Jordan during Exercise Pashtun Commando in August 2013.

Farewell to the Sea King, 2015 to 2018

The Sea King's retirement came in stages, as the Merlin took over the Navy's jobs and civilian helicopters took over rescue. The RAF's rescue crews stood down in 2015 and the Navy's at the end of that year.

On 21 March 2016 all five of the remaining Junglie HC4s flew a farewell tour over the south and south-west of England, as in the photograph above, and on 23 March three of them flew over the decommissioning of 848 Squadron, the last HC4 unit. The Commando Helicopter Force's work passed to ex-RAF Merlins, fitted out for the sea.

The Baggers were the last. On 19 September 2018 two ASaC7s of 849 Squadron flew a three-hour farewell over Devon and Cornwall, passing Teignmouth, Dartmoor, Padstow, St Ives and Land's End.

A week later, on 26 September 2018, the last three airworthy aircraft, ZE420, XV714 and ZA126, flew from Culdrose to HMS Sultan in Gosport, where the Navy trains its engineers, passing over Portsmouth Harbour on the way. It was forty-nine years since the first Sea Kings had arrived at Culdrose, and the moment is captured in our print of the last three Sea Kings arriving at HMS Sultan.

The radar job passed to Crowsnest, a system carried by the Merlin.

Retirement did not mean the scrapyard for all of them. The Pakistan Navy bought seven ex-British Sea Kings, three of which were restored to fly again, and in November 2022 the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, announced that three ex-British Sea Kings would go to Ukraine, the first helicopters Britain sent there, with Ukrainian crews trained by the Royal Navy.

Around the World: America, Apollo and Marine One

In the United States the Sea King had a career every bit as varied as in Britain. In Vietnam, Navy Sea Kings rescued airmen shot down over the North and in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the rescue squadron HC-7, flying Sea Kings known as "Big Mother", saved 150 people, 130 of them in the combat zone.

The US Navy retired its last operational Sea King in December 2009, calling it the longest-serving helicopter in its history.

Its most famous passengers came from space. Sea Kings of the US Navy's HS-4 squadron recovered the astronauts of Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12 and 13 after splashdown, and the most famous of them all was Helicopter 66, the SH-3D which lifted Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins from the Pacific in July 1969 and flew them to USS Hornet.

By a nice coincidence, this was the same summer that the first Westland Sea Kings were arriving at Culdrose. Contrary to legend, Helicopter 66 did not recover every Apollo crew; other units and other Sea Kings recovered several missions, including Apollo 7 and Apollo 17.

The real 66 was renumbered after Apollo 11 and then repainted with its famous number for later missions; it crashed on a training flight in 1975, so every "66" now in a museum is a replica.

Sea Kings also carried the President of the United States from the early 1960s, as the VH-3 in the white-topped livery of the Marine Corps' HMX-1 squadron. "Marine One" is not a type of helicopter, though; it is the call sign of whichever Marine helicopter the President is aboard.

The new VH-92A has now taken over most of those flights, and the last VH-3Ds are being phased out, with the change expected to be complete by 2030.

Westland's Sea Kings Abroad

Westland sold its Sea Kings to eight overseas customers: Australia, Belgium, Egypt, West Germany, India, Norway, Pakistan and Qatar. Several of them flew their Sea Kings for longer than Britain did.

West Germany's navy took around 22 or 23 Mk 41s from 1973 to 1974, mainly for search and rescue over the North Sea and the Baltic, and they flew 14,645 rescue missions before they were retired in August 2024, replaced by the NH90 Sea Lion.

Norway's No. 330 Squadron flew its Mk 43s on rescue work for half a century, until its last Sea King flight on 27 November 2023, handing over to the AW101 after something like 45,000 to 48,000 missions, depending on who is counting. Belgium's five Mk 48s at Koksijde flew from 1976 to 21 March 2019, saving 1,757 lives.

Australia's Navy flew twelve Sea Kings with 817 Squadron from 1975 until 16 December 2011. Its worst day came on 2 April 2005, when Sea King Shark 02, from HMAS Kanimbla, crashed on the Indonesian island of Nias while bringing relief after an earthquake, killing nine of the eleven aboard.

The inquiry found that a single split pin was missing from a nut in the flight controls, and it also criticised wider failings in the Navy's maintenance and safety culture.

India's Navy commissioned its first Sea King squadron, INAS 330 "Harpoons", on 17 April 1971, and its Sea Kings flew anti-submarine patrols in the war with Pakistan later that year. The Mk 42B squadron was decommissioned only on 14 June 2026, and six Mk 42Cs are still flying.

Egypt and Qatar bought the Commando, and Qatar's whole Commando fleet later went to the Pakistan Navy, which inducted it in 2022.

Abroad, Sea Kings were built under licence by Agusta in Italy, Mitsubishi in Japan and in Canada, where the CH-124 Sea King served the Canadian forces from 1963 until 2018, fifty-five years.

In an irony that would not have been lost on the Task Force, according to Argentine naval histories, Argentine Navy Sea Kings flew troops and divers from the icebreaker Almirante Irízar during the invasion of the Falklands on 2 April 1982.

Still Flying: Ukraine, India and Beyond

More than sixty years after its first flight, the Sea King is still at work. In Ukraine, three ex-British Sea Kings have been joined by six ex-German aircraft, and at the Farnborough Airshow in July 2026 a Ukrainian Sea King appeared fitted with launch rails for small interceptor drones, meant for shooting down the Shahed attack drones that Russia fires at Ukrainian cities.

It is hard to think of a better example of an old aircraft learning new tricks.

India, Pakistan, Argentina and Peru, which received six ex-Spanish SH-3Ds in 2023, still fly Sea Kings too, and the US Marine Corps still has its last presidential VH-3Ds. The Sea King may have left British service in 2018, but somewhere in the world, most days, one is still starting its engines.

Myths and Misunderstandings

A few things that are often said about the Sea King are not quite right.

"It was a British design." It was not. The Sea King was designed by Sikorsky in the United States. What Westland did was substantial, with new engines, electronics, sonar and flight controls, but the airframe was American.

"Junglie" came from the green paint. The nickname came from the Commando squadrons' jungle operations in Borneo in the 1960s, long before the HC4 existed.

Radar Sea Kings fought in the Falklands. The first two Baggers were built in about eleven weeks and sailed south on 2 August 1982, after the Argentine surrender.

The Sea King entered service in 1981. That date is sometimes given, but the Navy's Sea Kings began their trials in 1969 and 824 Squadron was operational in February 1970. The RAF's HAR3 arrived in 1978.

Helicopter 66 recovered every Apollo crew. It recovered five, Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12 and 13, and the famous number it wore on later flights was a fresh coat of paint.

The Penlee Sea King rescued survivors. Despite heroic efforts, it could not reach the Union Star, and no one from either vessel survived.

Why the Sea King Still Matters

The Sea King is one of those aircraft that became part of the national furniture. It hunted submarines through the Cold War, carried Marines into the Falklands, hovered in the smoke over Sir Galahad, watched the desert in Afghanistan, and pulled tens of thousands of people out of the sea and off the hills of Britain.

Many people in this country are alive today because a Sea King came for them.

Our collection of Sea King photo prints follows the type through almost every one of those roles, including a Junglie in the Arctic over the mountains of northern Norway, a Merlin and Sea King flying together off Cornwall, and a Sea King Mk7 taking off from the destroyer HMS Diamond for the first time. Every photograph in this article is available as a print, along with the rest of our Royal Navy helicopter prints.

For the jump jets that shared the decks of Hermes and Invincible with the Sea Kings in 1982, read our history of the Harrier jump jet, and for the air force that flew the yellow Sea Kings, our history of the Royal Air Force.