The worlds stock of MD530 helicopters is suddenly diminished. A few years ago (when she was in charge at Mesa) Lynn Tilton kicked aside all/most of the civil market aspirations of MDHI and went with the DoD military deal that was going to save the company. The result has been that most of recent production has been the military airframes for the Afghan Air Force. True there have been a few military sales to such as Nigeria but the bulk was Afghan.
Into the future it appeared that the company was assured of regular spares and repairs from the initial sale and then the repeated top up sales.
Now that appears to be in tatters and all of a sudden [it seems] the MDHI management are belatedly approaching the civil US market they abandoned [so callously?] for the golden future that was in Afghanistan. Look we have not really dumped all those 530/902 projects we presented at HAI year after year.... we were just kidding... and look we are no longer putting parts production in house because we have been let down by fellow industrialists ... we are outsourcing [again]. Nose gets longer and longer.
It is possible that the discerning customer, the one that lived through the years of no spares available, may have tired of the duplicity and the hard times in Mesa are going to get harder.