Presidential Helicopter

On 2005-04-05 17:41:55 -0400, "Helowriter" said:

1.Apaches did very, very well in the fight for Baghdad and elsewhere in
OIF. And those people were using more than spitballs.

Yep, same as the Afghans (couldn't throw a rock -- an item in which
that nation abounds, if only there was a market they'd be rich as
Saudis, and they're much nicer chaps when they're not shooting at you
-- without hitting 14.5 or [gulp] 23mm AA. And 12.7s were literally
more common than pencils.

Their marksmanship was fortunately horrible, ignorance of or absence of
sights helped there. But if one of them got lucky and lit a copter up
it was generally time to find a nice place to park, even in an Apache.

The idea that the Apache is armored well enough to go toe to toe with
AA guns was embedded in Army doctrine. I think that fallacy (which the
WWI aviators, and the WWII fighter-bombers, and the Vietnam guys all
had to relearn) been kicked out of bed. Nothing like losing a dozen
airframes in one go, even if they do make it back to base with holes
the size of your fist in MR transmissions and whatnot.

2. You're right - that sounds like B.S. A foreign competition pulled
the same stunt requiring a cargo container just longer than the basic
H-92 cabin

I have to relook the cabin size thing, I want to be certain I have the
relative sizes of the NH90, S-92 and EH101 straight (from smallest to
largest) but Sikorsky was told that by the Navy -- something that would
not fit their helicopter needed to go on, and "sorry old boy, for
putting you through this." And Sikorsky decided not to appeal. Does
that mean they agree? Does that mean that they knew "the fix was in?"
These are the kinds of questions where execs who appear forthcoming,
change the subject.

You can always find an angle with which to rig a contest. I'm just not
sure why our military would want to play those games again for the
benefit of Agusta Westland. If the PRV competition is rigged, I would
hope for a Congressional investigation.

Well, one of the requirements is that the a/c air-refuel at 10,000 MSL.
Be difficult for any of the contenders to meet that but easiest for the
EH101.

You could argue that this is a legit requirement. AFSOC lost an HH in
Afghanistan doing the daft thing they do over there, refuel while
flying through the valleys. At night. Of course, they need to do that
because the HH60 has the unrefueled range of a spitball, so on a 150 NM
radius run (below average in Afghanistan), you are hitting the tanker
twice, once each going and coming.

Murphy's law (and the use of stateside HH units for maritime SAR) means
that you will be doing this when weather is in **** state.

If they're going to do that, they need a Chelton display, not strictly
rely on RADALT and FLIR which work OK in rolling terrain but in the
mountains, can only tell you you're going to die a couple seconds
before you hit. The Chelton displays the terrain from maps in memory.
Works even when the FLIR is choking on dust or whatever. And it's TSOd
and it's dirt cheap. So naturally the Pentagon, which is only
interested in max bennies for legions of uniformed or retired/industry
procurement wallahs, is not buying.

3. The HH-60 falls short only in that requirements (and loads) have
grown.

Gotta disagree with you there. Talk to the pilots and especially the
PJs in AFSOC. The ones that never flew the H-3 or H-53 are resigned to
the 60, but it always was a mismatch with the mission. A PJ can't
properly treat a rescuee, hunched over in the back of the cabin. And on
the old Sikorskys (as on all the new contenders except, I believe, the
Osprey, which isn't a serious contender for this contract), the pilot
can get out of his seat and stretch (or be relieved by a relief pilot).
In the 60 he's pretty well stuck for the duration of the mission.

Finally, there's that short legs problem that, as I said, literally
kills people. The S-70/H-60 is a fantastic helicopter, but not in this
job.
--
cheers

-=K=-

Rule #1: Don't hit anything big.

Don't minimize the threat in Afghanistan. The bad guys were nervy if
not sophisticated, and if they were dug-in someplace you had to go,
they were a threat. (The MH-47s brought down around Roberts' Ridge
prove that.)

No-one ever plans to go toe-to-toe with air defenses ('Case you didn't
know, the red coat thing doesn't work well). The idea is evade 'em
first, jam 'em second, and then take the hit as a last resort. Apaches
are good at evading and taking the hit - they don't have good jammers
yet. The Comanche was biased toward evading the threat - maybe too
much so.

As to the wonderful '101 - yes indeed it is wider. The mystery box of
course could fit nothing else, even though the '92 was modular and
already took two easy stretches. You could match the length of the '92
to the 101 and have a more crashworthy box without fuel under the
floor. All the PRV solutions apparently provide more headroom for PJs
to work - let's see if the requirement calls for some other magic
dimension.

I agree you want to refuel at mountain elevations - but you should look
at the full requirement, not find pockets that steer the choice
offshore. The VXX decision found the one pocket and just ignored a
generation of safety design progress, and 40+ years of US government
security regulations.

Agreed, 60's have less room and less gas in them than HH-3Es and Pave
Lows. The things were still able to get to people down in Iraq and
Kosovo. They also deploy rapidly on C-5s and C-17s without removing
the transmission, and they have the ballistic tolerance of a Black
Hawk, so they're not a total mismatch. Bigger will be better, but not
at the expense of superior ballistic tolerance, lower operating and
support costs, and all that other stuff the US military usually says it
wants.

That TERPROM-type solution assumes you've got your digital elevation
map for every place you're going to fly. You could also buy a terrain
following/terrain avoidance radar and digital map already integrated on
the MH-60K/MH-47E/CV-22, albeit for more bucks. The tradeoffs are to
be determined, but the stored terrain solution doesn't do it all.

I suspect any of the candidate aiframes will be compatible with the
MEP, but I still think it's a mistake to buy someone else's problem
(like the 101) to show how much you like them. (No one will say just
what has to be done to fix the 101 so it doesn't flatten again like
that Merlin in the UK.) Likewise, it is to our best interest to have a
viable helicopter industry, not a build-to-print shop for expensive
European engineering.

HW

Oh, and the decision on the VXX protest had to be weighed against
bigger upcoming programs. I suspect there was some worry that a messy
fight would get the customer mad, whether or not the VXX decision was
fair.

HW