LA County Approves $43 Million Firehawk Helicopter, Including $5.1 Million in Tariffs on a Polish-Built Aircraft

Los Angeles County is buying a new firefighting helicopter, and the bill comes to $43 million. The Board of Supervisors approved the purchase Tuesday, adding another Sikorsky S-70i Firehawk to the county fire department's aerial fleet, according to the New York Post.

Roughly $5,123,546 of that total comes from a 15% import tariff, the Post reported. That tariff exists because the helicopter, despite being designed by an American company, is manufactured at a Sikorsky facility in Poland.

Sikorsky is a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, headquartered in Connecticut. The company builds military variants of the Black Hawk in the United States. But the civilian S-70i model, the one fire departments buy, comes only from Sikorsky's Polish plant. There is no U.S. production line for it, and no domestic manufacturer builds a comparable heavy firefighting helicopter, county officials said.

That leaves LA County with one option: pay the tariff or don't get the aircraft.

The 15% duty applies under the trade agreement the Trump administration struck with the European Union in July 2025. Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told the board the county won't know the exact tariff amount until final payment, meaning the $43 million price tag could still shift before delivery.

What the Helicopter Actually Does

This isn't a luxury purchase dressed up as an emergency necessity. The Firehawk is a serious piece of equipment. It carries a 1,000-gallon belly tank and can refill in under 60 seconds by hovering over a lake or reservoir and dropping a retractable snorkel. It's rigged for night missions, with a cockpit compatible with night-vision goggles, letting crews fight fires after dark when many wildfires make their most dangerous moves.

Given California's wildfire history, and the destruction from LA-area fires in recent years, county officials clearly see this as a needed investment in emergency response capacity.

The Tariff Question Deserves a Fair Hearing

There's a reasonable case for tariffs on imported goods generally: protecting domestic manufacturing jobs, reducing reliance on foreign supply chains, and giving U.S. companies room to compete. That's the argument the Trump administration has made for tariff policy broadly, and it's not a frivolous one.

But this case is a clean example of where that logic breaks down. There's no American factory losing business to Sikorsky's Polish plant, because there is no American factory making this helicopter. Lockheed Martin, an American company, chose to build the civilian S-70i overseas. The tariff doesn't protect a domestic competitor. It just adds $5.1 million to a bill that a county government, and by extension its taxpayers, has to pay for equipment that doesn't have a domestic substitute.

Tariffs as a concept can serve legitimate purposes. But this is a specific case where a policy designed to shield American manufacturing ends up taxing American local government for buying American-designed equipment that simply isn't made in America. County officials didn't have a workaround. Marrone made clear there was no domestic alternative on the table.

What's Left Unanswered

The Post's reporting lays out the sticker shock clearly but leaves some practical questions open. Whether the county explored buying from a non-EU Sikorsky facility remains unclear. So does whether other counties or state agencies face the same tariff exposure on similar aircraft purchases, or whether Sacramento has any plan to offset these costs for local fire agencies statewide.

The final tariff bill, which Marrone said won't be locked in until payment, also remains uncertain. It could land higher or lower than the $5.1 million estimate. Given how tariff schedules and exchange rates can shift, that's a real variable on a purchase this size.

For now, LA County taxpayers are on the hook for a helicopter they clearly need, at a price inflated by a trade policy nobody designed with wildfire response in mind.