MAD about the Strikehawk

Fred J. McCall wrote:
"Thomas Schoene" wrote:

Fred J. McCall wrote:

The real issue is if you only have one aircraft to prosecute with.
MADVEC is a decent way to release a weapon from the same vehicle
while dipping sonar is not. Fly the cloverleaf and on the last
inbound leg dump the fish. There is no equivalently accurate and
convenient way
for a dipping helo to deliver a torpedo.

That seems logical. But I've seen a couple of shots of SH-60s
dropping torpedos with some sort of cable trailing vertically from
the fuselage
clearly not a MAD tow). I can't think of anything it might be
other than a
dipping sonar tether, but if someone can offer a better suggestion,
I'm all ears (metaphorically speaking).

I can't imagine dropping a fish at the dip. The odds would seem to be
significantly non-zero that you would hit your own sonar.

There are a couple of shots that show what I mean. (the cable is
very faint in the second one)

Are you sure that isn't a MAD bird?

Pretty sure. The location is wrong, and these are supose to be Seahawk
Foxtrots, which never had MAD (for much the same reason the Romeo won't)

From the hang of the cable I
would have said it wasn't one, either, but the apparent backward angle
seems to indicate that the helo is moving forward, which you wouldn't
typically do while at the dip.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...s/SH-60F_cable
5.jpg

http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...s/SH-60F_sonar
-cable4.jpg

The position doesn't look quite right for the MAD bird, though. They
may have been at the dip and pulled it up to drop a fish. That would
explain why there's some forward motion. Pull the sonar out of the
water and start toward datum to drop a fish.

I thought they might be sideslipping to get some seperation between the
sonar head and the torpedo. It would be easier to do this if the head were
still in the water, with some extra drag to slow it down and keep it from
swinging like a pendulum. But the load on the cable could be scary, so
perhaps not.




I thought omni CASS was pretty old technology. Anyone know when it
was introduced?

The P-3 had them earlier, but surface ships (who did the processing
for helo-dropped buoys) didn't have gear that would handle it until
SQR-17 was fielded (mid-70s). Even then, they were viewed as a lot
more expensive than passive buoys so typically weren't carried. And
of course nobody wanted to drop straight pingers unless they were
trying to herd the contact in some direction.

SH-2 predated all that by just a bit. :-)

Does it really? The LAMPS I contract was awarded in 1970, and the initial
batch of 20 SH-2Ds was completed in 1972. This site at least says active
buoys were part of the kit.

http://members.cts.com/sd/b/bwickes/heloasw2.html

[Crossposted to rec.aviation.military.naval, where some AW types have been
known to hang out. Gordon?]
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Tom Schoene Replace "invalid" with "net" to e-mail
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