The EC725 was born for war. The French Air Force had trialled the AS532 A2 Cougar for combat rescue between 1996 and 1999 and rejected it as underpowered and short-legged, so Eurocopter built a more ambitious derivative. France received its first EC725 in February 2005. Barely six weeks after formal service entry, in the summer of 2006, three were sent to Cyprus to evacuate civilians from Lebanon during Opération Baliste. From December 2006 French EC725s flew from Kabul International Airport in support of coalition forces in Afghanistan, and they became the mount of French special forces and combat rescue crews.

The Caracal can refuel in flight, from a tanker or in the hover, extending its endurance from about four and a half hours to more than ten, according to Airbus. Exports followed. Brazil ordered 50 for its three services in 2008, assembled by Helibras at Itajubá, and its Navy integrated the Exocet anti-ship missile. Malaysia’s EC725s searched for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 and rescued climbers from Mount Kinabalu after the 2015 Sabah earthquake. In Mexico the type met organised crime: in May 2015 a Mexican Air Force EC725 was forced down in Jalisco when a rocket-propelled grenade struck its tail rotor, and six soldiers died. Poland selected 50 H225Ms in 2015, then abandoned the deal in October 2016.

The Super Puma’s civil fame rests on oil. From the early 1980s Bristow, Bond, CHC and others flew AS332s and later EC225s between Aberdeen, Sumburgh, Stavanger and Bergen and the platforms offshore, in weather that would ground most aircraft. CHC alone had 56 Super Pumas in 2014.

The North Sea also exposed the design’s weak point: the main gearbox. On 1 April 2009 a Bond AS332 L2, G-REDL, lost its main rotor near Peterhead after a catastrophic failure in the gearbox, killing all 16 aboard. In 2012 two EC225s, G-REDW and G-CHCN, ditched safely after fatigue cracks in a bevel gear shaft caused oil-pump failures; the AAIB traced them to corrosion pits and underestimated weld stresses. On 29 April 2016 an H225 carrying oil workers lost its rotor near Turoy, Norway, killing 13, and the type was grounded by British and Norwegian authorities. Norway’s Statoil later dropped the type for good. Airbus redesigned components and the H225 returned slowly to offshore work, but the episode cost the family much of its civil market, even as its military sales held up.

• SA 331: Puma converted as a Makila test-bed, first flight 5 September 1977.
• AS332 B/C/F/M Super Puma: military short (B, F naval) and long (M) versions; civil AS332 C and L.
• AS332 L1 / L2: stretched civil versions; L2 with longer rotor blades and EFIS, the North Sea standard of the 1990s and 2000s.
• AS532 Cougar: military versions from 1990 – UC/AC short, UL/AL long utility and armed, SC naval with Exocet, U2/A2 Mk II.
• EC725 / H225M Caracal: combat rescue and tactical transport version with five-blade rotor, Makila 2A engines and glass cockpit; first flight 27 November 2000.
• EC225 / H225: civil offshore and SAR counterpart of the EC725.
• H215 / H215M: 2014 rebranding of the AS332 L1e/C1e and AS532 AL/UL, assembled at Brașov, Romania.
• Licence builds: IPTN / PTDI in Indonesia, Helibras in Brazil (HM-3, VH-34, H-36).

The Swiss Air Force bought 15 AS332M1 Super Pumas (TH89) and later Cougars (TH98), flying search and rescue, transport and humanitarian missions; in August 2021 three of them flew 226 sorties over Euboea and the Peloponnese, dropping more than 386 tonnes of water on Greek wildfires. Spain’s Super Pumas were for a time the only rotorcraft providing combat rescue and medevac cover in western Afghanistan between 2005 and 2011. The Netherlands flew AS532 U2 Cougars from Gilze-Rijen and is replacing them with 12 H225Ms for special operations from 2030. France’s Cougars served in the Sahel, where a Cougar and a Tiger collided at night in Mali on 25 November 2019, killing 13 French soldiers, the country’s heaviest single loss since the 1983 Beirut bombing.

Medium-heavy twins are expensive aircraft to own. Contract values for the Caracal include far more than airframes: Brazil’s roughly €1.9 billion deal for 50 aircraft paid for a Helibras production line, local content, weapons integration and support, and Poland’s abandoned 2015 deal was priced at about PLN 13.3 billion, 40 percent of it for training and logistics. Dividing such totals by the number of helicopters overstates the price of each airframe.

Running costs are dominated by the dynamic system. After the 2009 and 2016 accidents, main gearbox inspections, component redesigns and life limits rose sharply for the AS332 L2 and H225, which is one reason oil companies moved to newer types. For a military Caracal, fuel for two Makila 2A1s, scheduled maintenance and spares put the cost per flight hour into the thousands of dollars; the figure in the table is a hedged estimate, as no operator publishes an official number.