Yep, that's me, Monday morning quarterback, Tuesday afternoon 'told you
so.' And now that ARH and LUH are here, I'm telling you it was a
mistake for Boeing to take itself out of the light helicopter business.
Now they have to buy the airframe from a shaky partner, and may lose
the ARH because of that. They also dealt themselves out of the
light/commerical tilt rotor business - and ancillary
government/military sales. (I know -- it's a fad, and Bell will never
sell more than a handful of 609s and derivatives.)

Salesmen make business -- if Eurocopter and Bell could sustain
commercial product lines in tough times, I suspect Boeing could have
too. Do you blame people for not buying MD600s and Exploriers from a
Dutch holding company when the two major suppliers have stable support
networks? That doesn't mean the product lines were losers. And it
doesn't mean the technology in them is worthless.

The composite blades finally in test for the AH-64 are made like those
already on the 530F (same autoclaves, too). Bell 430s were using that
four-bladed composite rotor head and blade technology way in advance of
the AH-1Z/UH-1Y go-ahead. A lot of that flaw-tolerant S-92 technology
makes good sense for a military operator who has to fly alot, take
battle damage, and stay within a budget. HUMS and lot of this dual-use
stuff evolves in parallel.

Commercial utilization rates are typically higher than military, and
commercial operators get real mad when they can't fly -- that gives you
RAM technologies directly applicable to military helicopters. I'm told
some of the latest FARs are tougher than MILSPEC.

Boeing figured 20-year sole-source military contracts like Chinook and
Apache modernization and V-22 and Comanche were sure bets -- ooops
Comanche wasn't a sure bet. Now, DoD has no problem going offshore for
helicopters. I don't think we should just surrender the market and the
industry to Europe. Monday morning, that might be good for business,
and Tuesday afternoon bad for the country.

HW