Norway to buy 6 Seahawk helicopters for $1.1 bln from Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky

Norway’s military plans to buy six Seahawk helicopters for 12 billion crowns ($1.14 billion) from Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky, the country’s defense minister said on Tuesday.

The NATO member, which shares a border with Russia in the Arctic, is responsible for monitoring a vast sea area of some 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) and has long been seeking to boost its monitoring capacity.

“This will strengthen our national control, the military’s preparedness and our presence in the northern areas,” Bjoern Arild Gram told a news conference.

In June, Oslo said it was axing its fleet of NH90 military helicopters and said it would ask for a refund from a consortium led by Airbus, which hit back at the time by calling the move “legally groundless.”

Norway said the helicopters it ordered from NHIndustries – owned by Airbus Helicopters, Italy’s Leonardo and Fokker Aerostructures of the Netherlands – were either unreliable, were delivered late or not delivered.