IIRC and I'm not doing very well when I cannot get the pilot's name right, one of the members of the BofI was a very respected member of the Support Helicopter force. I was a surprise to me when the verdict started to filter through and it apparantly filtered through to the AOC. He took further advice and threw the conclusions back at them and told them to re-write it. At the same time the FRCs were amended.
Bigpants. It will all end in tears. The Third World is littered with derelict Russian equipment. There is nothing intrinsically wrong wiith them, there just aren't any spares. They are either not available or the lead time is too great.
I worked for a long time in China and in the late nineties the Chinese civil aviation was expanding explosively. They were buying everything in sight, even BAC111s. I flew a couple of times in the Tu 154M. One of the things that stood out when you walked in was that several of the overhead locker doors were missing. My Chinese engineers later explained that they were irreplacable even though the aircraft had only just gone out of production. In Tanjian in north eastern China I looked out of the window on the approach and there was a clutch of surplus Aeoflot 154s on a pan. They had been bought by the regional Chinese airline to be used as Xmas trees.
Apart from a few licence built AS Dauphines the civil helicopter industry in China is exclusively Western equipment and also since the turn of the century so are their fixed wing brothers.
They do produce helicopters that have a unique capability. To see a MI 26 underslinging a full sized tracked excavator into the hills during the Chinese Earthquake plus another one with a bulldozer in the back is something you do not see very often. However you cannot get away from the fact that they have low TBOs and poor spares support plus any political ramifications.