basically the military was looking for a cheap and fast way to get more choppers in the air but it backfired. would you rather the military spend too much money or not enough? personally i'm all for scrapping the whole transaction and buying more blackhawks
This is classic Pentagon thinking. They get six copters, find they overheat, but still recommend that we buy a bunch more instead of the proven Blackhawks. This is one of the reasons the defense budget is nuts, yet we still don't get the right tools for our people in the field.
the only problem i have with buying blackhawks in this case is they could potential pull them from a relief detail to be used in the war. not that i'm opposed to using more choppers in Iraq, but it would defeat the purpose of buying more choppers
Do we really want a rescue chopper with a 104 degree internal temp on an 80-degree day? Maybe that works if you're pulling people out of the Baring Sea during King Crab season, but it sucks muchly for S&R in the southwest, southeast or most of the country during the summer. Rescue Blackhawks would have different avionics and would require a lot of retrofitting to be used for combat, so I think the risk of division is minimal.
fair enough, i can see that. though according to this article they're looking to replace hueys and kiowas, could the blackhawk alone do that?
I think the blackhawk is a pretty flexible airframe — I'm pretty sure it could replace the Huey. The Apache is probably a better replacement for the Kiowa, IMO.
They're not replacements for the UH-60, they replace all our ancient Cayuses and moderately old Kiowas, IIRC.
One thing I never really understood in my lengthy military career: Instead of taking a huge gamble on new things, why not just make more of the old dependable designs? Just sayin....
Because advances in military warfare generally make older designs obsolete or outmoded. Newer things go faster, harder, live longer, etc.
OK. Here's a case of someone not fully thinking things through; not focusing on what the mission is. They want these birds because a Blackhawk is way too much bird for the task at hand. They don't need a big, expensive combat aircraft to perform light administrative duties, so this new chopper is a good decision. Problem is that they went and applied a cookie-cutter mentality to the buy. Here are the relevant passages: and So some knucklehead managed to apply the reasoning used in designing a combat aircraft to a chopper that was designed to shuttle VIPs. :roll: Instead of thinking about what they were trying to accomplish, something the commercial version of this helicopter could easily do, the pinheads handling the contract decided to second-guess the designers.
