Ayala,
the dome isn’t entirely useless, although in a certain perspective it really is. These helicopters which have such a radar dome, including Belgian and UK ones I think, need fly in a Z-pattern. They can’t look in front of themselves so they have to alter course to get a view ahead. Not really handy if you’re doing a SAR mission that requires you to get fast to your search station or a ship (to winch someone off). I can imagine in combat missions that this is pretty annoying too.
So it’s handy because it adds another capability to the helicopter, but highly annoying and sometimes disadvantageous if you have to operate it in certain cases.
Seakings made by Westland & Canadian Seakings have Radome behind the main gearbox, I saw the working of radar in flight that they have only 12 degrees blindness due to main rotor gearbox,otherwise it works normally, thats why operators from India/Germany/Norway they installed additional nose radars for full 360 degrees coverage.
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