Aussie News (Flying units)

The Army is to get 12 MRH-90 Helos (you’ve probably already heard this), these are Australian specific versions of the NH-90 with many feature not seen on the other nations models, though the only thing I can confirm of this is Dust protectors for the air intakes.

Also the Army’s 173Sqdn who operated the DHC-6 Twin Otters and King Air 200’s (the latter being news to me) are giving these back to their owners (they were leased units and not officially on the list- though the DHC-6’s did have an over all white paint job with a rather nice looking Amry insignia on either side of the aft fuselage, I have a pic somewhere if you want I can send it to you). They are now to lease three Beech King Air 350’s from Hawker Pacific, this brings them into line with the RAAF who currently have 7 on an extended leasing agreement for training. It is not clear if these new units will adopt a similar paint job as those of the Air Force, I do have a pic of one but it is in a civilian scheme. The reason for the adoption of this is simple, now the RAAF and AAAC pilots can all train under one facility which seems to be the current idea of the ADF (they were doing this when I was in the Navy, closing multipule bases that taught all the same thing for the three different services and having just one base training all three).

5Sqdn of the AAAC is to disband is flight detachment that is currently deployed to the Army base at Holsworthy (South West Sydney) and the unit will reform as a pure anti-terrorist unit though for now all that is known is that this will be called the Australian Anti-Terrorist Responce Unit or simply ATRU), there have been no indications as to wether or not other states will form such units, but Sydney is seen as the prime target in Australia .

The RAAF is considering an engine replacement for the DHC-4 Carribous rather than replacng them all together, should this happen the remaining 14 will then be zero houred and equiped with PT-6/65 or 76 engines depending on which unit provides the better power output in the areas where we use these machines. There are many reasons why the Army and certainly the ADF does not want to retire these machines and after hearing the case, I can only agree that these machines are so valuable that we would be stupid to loose them.

The Navy has come under more fire over the acqusition of the SH-2G’s it is becoming more likely that we will retire these machines before one is even deployed aboard any ship. To day only one has entered limited acceptance service and the other 10 are still in various stagesof completion, there are still five over in the US and of those two still haven’t started their conversion. The ADF is now looking at legal action to regain some of the costs from Honeywell and Litton who were the original systems contractors but walked out after having finished only 25% of the design and fitout work. CSC of Australia (a computer solutions and service group) have taken on the job and are making progress very fast but have had to work from scratch since the US companies would not release any information or systems.

There are now only five Seaking Mk50A’s in service with 817Sqdn, these have been cleared for service after the findings of the Accident on Nias earlier this year. They have all been completely pulled down and checked with 817 personel having been worked harder than ever before. Most were happy to do this out of respect for those lost and to prevent it happening again, personel in this sqdn really take pride in their work and love these machines so anything bad happening to them reflects poorly on the unit, this isn’t the case though. It should be mentioned that 817 is the best unit in the RAN.