May 18, 2015: Poland has decided to purchase 70 EC725 “Caracal” transport helicopters from AirBus for $45 million each. The EC725 is an 11 ton aircraft with a useful load of 5.5 tons, a top speed of 324 kilometers an hour and endurance of about five hours. The main competition for this sale was the American UH-60L which is about the same size as the EC725 and has similar performance.

A key element in choosing AirBus was that much of the assembly and some of the component manufacturing would take place in Poland. AirBus has another edge in that they are a large European consortium with manufacturing and assembly facilities all over Europe. Since the Poles already have decades of experience manufacturing helicopters, AirBus seemed to be a good business opportunity as well as a supplier of a helicopter competitive with the combat experienced UH-60.