The 18th edition of the Blade series exercise, the Hot Blade 24 hosted by Portugal, has finished on the 5th of June, which run together with Real Thaw 24, the Portuguese Air Force's national exercise.
Hot Blade is a helicopter exercise that is part of the MHTC helicopter exercise programme, organised by the Portuguese Air Force under the umbrella of the Multinational Helicopter Training Centre based at Sintra Air Base. Following the transfer of EDA programmes to the MHTC, this was the first Blade exercise to be conducted under the MHTC umbrella. Its objective is to increase interoperability between European helicopter crews using common helicopter TTP and to plan and execute complex missions in a multinational environment in accordance with the MHTC SOP. The focus of the exercise is to enhance interoperability at the tactical level between rotary and fixed-wing aviation units using a COMposite Air Operations (COMAO) concept in a realistic and challenging joint and combined scenario and to prepare them for current theatres of operation.
Every year, the Portuguese Air Force conducts the Real Thaw exercise in a scenario that creates a realistic operational environment for combined joint missions at the tactical level. The participants carry out a high-level tactical exercise aimed at maximising integration, interoperability and learning, in order to continue preparing and qualifying their forces for full mission accomplishment and to guarantee the public interest and international missions assigned to them with maximum security and efficiency.
In the 2024 combined edition of the multinational exercises Real Thaw and Hot Blade, participants from Portugal, Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain and Switzerland had the opportunity to train common TTPs in order to improve interoperability and multi-domain operations skills,
In the end, this combined edition made it possible to improve the quality of the exercise, since the detailed planning of the specific tasks of the missions was more detailed and, above all, had to be very well integrated into the COMAO planning.
Força Aérea Portuguesa (emfa.pt)
Allied Air Command | Portugal hosts two multinational air exercises at Beja (nato.int)
