Westland Scout helicopter armament question

i dont know what effect it would have had on a scout, however the change from cabin mounted 7.62 gpmg to 0.50″ browning on the external carier has lead to a LOT of cracking to the airframe, any shoot is followed now by a good look at various points of the structure including tailcone attachment stations due to the lateral loading when firing.

When I first came across the Lynx AH1 in service as groundcrew ISTR noting that the cabin floor is fitted with small hatches that would be the right size to cover feed-chutes for 20mm rounds. Whether these chutes were carried-over onto the MK7 and 9 I’m not certain, as by the time I qualified to fly them we always had a plywood freight-floor fitted.

The Rhodesians fitted 20 mm cannons to their Alouette IIIs. Well described in the outstanding book of that era Winds of Destruction.

Not directly related to the Scout, but fairly close. I should say up front that I’ve never been sufficiently exercised to try to establish the veracity of this story, so I’ll present it here as an anecdote only. Perhaps someone else can fill in the detail.

Back in the 1970s, in the mis-spent corner of my youth, I spent some time at art school in London. One of my fellow students stood out from the rest of us as being rather more grounded in reality, as well as being one of only two not straight from school. He wouldn’t say much about his past life, but once he found my interest in aviation he eventually told me this story as we pushed his dead motorbike through Covent Garden (dropping more oil than either of us thought it could possibly contain in the process!) He then clammed up and would be drawn no further. Doug had started his career in the Army and worked his way up from being a very ordinary soldier to being AAC helicopter crew. Being rather good at that, he was chosen as part of the trials programme for the Lynx (only much later did it occur to me that this must have been before the Lynx formally entered service). Part of the trials involved firing various weapons from the door, on a variety of mounts, including fixed forward-firing mounts and strops across the door and all sorts in between. The weapons trialled were a wide variety from single GPMGs up to 20mm (and maybe even 30mm) rotary cannon. He mentioned the recoil from the cannon throwing the helicopter around most alarmingly. I don’t know any further details, but he was so thoroughly frightened by the process, and particularly the thought of using the bigger weapons in anger at low level, that he left the Army at the earliest opportunity and set out to become a fashion designer!

I last saw Doug in mid 1978 and have had little contact with anyone who also knew him since – I can’t even remember his surname. I have no reason to disbelieve his story, but as I say I’ve never followed it up to find how just how true it is either. If it is true, I am left with the thought that the Lynx is a bigger, heavier helicopter than the Scout, so the recoil effects on the Scout would have been even more profound. I don’t doubt Rosevidney1’s assertion that the Rhodesian’s found cannons on their Scouts to be game changers – it might also suggest they found some fairly ‘special’ people to fly them!

If I correctly remember, a number of weapons of varying calibres were trialled including rotating barrel efforts but it all came to naught under Treasury pressure (or so it was claimed). We ended up with the 7.62 mm GPMG – to the surprise of nobody! The Rhodesians had fitted 20 mm cannons to their helicopters and found them to be a game changer.