Well, we don’t remember the cabin being quite that small, but the military in Malaysia cancelled the purchase of four UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters after the nation’s serving monarch declared them to be “flying coffins.”
In a public statement delivered during a military parade in the Southeast Asia nation, Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar, the 17th king of Malaysia, said that a plan by the nation’s military to buy four Black Hawks — all roughly 30-year-old former U.S. Army helicopters — was a bad idea.
“Do we want to put our pilots in a ‘flying coffin?’” Sultan Ibrahim asked, according to the Malay-language daily paper Utusan Malaysia.
It was unclear if the monarch’s comments were aimed at the relatively cramped interior of the H-60 compared to other troop-carrying rotary aircraft in the U.S. inventory, like the H-53 of V-22 Osprey, or if the king was taking aim at the Black Hawk’s safety record. Questions on the king’s comments sent Thursday by Task & Purpose to the Malaysian embassy in Washington were not responded to.
If the latter, he’s a little off: A 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office found the Army and National Guard’s various H-60 Black Hawk models were, in terms of mishaps per flight hour, roughly twice as safe as CH-47 Chinooks and AH-64 Apaches across their fleets. And the January air-to-air crash in Washington, D.C., that killed three Black Hawk crew members and 64 civilians was the first fatal Black Hawk crash since September 2023. That 2023 crash, like multiple Black Hawk mishaps in recent years, was found to be due to human error, not safety issues with the UH-60.
In fact, sometimes dudes get hurt just randomly plowing into Black Hawks on their snow machines, which you can’t really blame on the aircraft (though a judge did in Massachusetts).
On the other hand, the monarch may just be wary of being ripped off.
In his speech, Sultan Ibrahim cited a deal from the 1980s in which Malaysia paid $1 million each for a fleet of 88 retired U.S. Navy A-4 SkyHawks, most of which dated to the Vietnam War, to become the primary ground attack aircraft for the Royal Malaysian Air Force.
The contract called for the U.S. to deliver 54 frontline A-4s plus 14 two-seat trainer aircraft, with the rest delivered for spare parts, according to Malaysian media and a history kept on a SkyHawk Association webpage. The planes were designated as A-4 PTMs, which U.S. mechanics who prepped the planes took to mean “Peculiar To Malaysia.”
But only 40 of the planes were ever delivered and none lasted more than 10 years, most with reputations for mechanical trouble.
“Let’s not repeat the mistake of buying SkyHawk aircraft second-hand,” Sultan Ibrahim said during a parade at Iskandar Camp for the 60th anniversary of the Gerak Khas, the nation’s primary special ops Army units.
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Sultan Ibrahim also blamed a class of charlatans well known to anyone who has studied how the U.S. military buys its weapons: Lobbyists.
“I believe this all happened because the Ministry of Defense is full of ‘agents’ or former generals who became ‘salesmen’,” said the monarch. “There were even fabric [or textile] selling companies that came in to sell ‘drones’.”
Perhaps the most troubling element of the cancelled sale — and the general Black Hawk slander itself — is where the nation may now turn for its military hardware.
Sultan Ibrahim met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow just days before his “flying coffin” decree. His Majesty also hosted Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in April.
Correction (Aug. 25, 2025): A previous version of this story referred to Malaysia as located in the South Pacific. It is in Southeast Asia, on the Malay Peninsula and the island of Borneo.
