Before insisting that the RAF has Booms, I’d be interested to know what percentage of misions would they actually use it.

The C17 is a the most obvious receiver from it, but just how many missions does this aircraft undertake that makes air-to-air the preference over fuel stopping?

It would be a seemingly expensive add-on, if not an everyday requirement…though I’m sure that other allied/coalition countries that use Booms would be please to have extra boomers around.

558 is listed on the Leuchars airshow website as flying assuming serviceability and test clearencies which now hopefully appear to be complete.

Great news for the likes of me who is young enough never to have seen a Vulcan fly.

Work is certainly underway at Rosyth, that much can be seen just from crossing the Forth Road Bridge…exactly what and how far along, I don’t know

More really positive news.

Perhaps the actual signings will be the real headline maker

The other half has this on PVR, rather than sit through the mush, could anyone give me a time frame (how far into the second part) to this comedy sequence.

I don’t understand why HM gouvernment wants Lynx in a time of budget cuts.

Agusta Westland is developing AW149 that probably will be in service in Italy and other countries. So, why not focusing on a single helicopter, saving costs for both countries?

AW-101 is the best product of italian-british technology and it is the state of art today in service, as well as one of the most beautiful chopper in the world. It would be great to see another chopper developped in common giving a lots of satisfactions as 101 did.

But, of course, if HM wants her own helicopter for her navy, well, it will be not Finmeccanica that oppose. 😉

Given the Future Lynx is being developed by AW your comments make no sense what so ever

The problem is that the Army Lynx is not to be used as an anti-tank bird anymore – the need is for a troop lift and medevac helo. This means that the small Lynx cabin is a major limitation, and frankly the fact that the Lynx was chosen without a competition is pretty troubling as well. A better bet would have been for the UK to fund a transplant – put the Super Lynx avionics into the AW-149, and switch to RTM-322s (for commonality with the Apache and Merlin). This would have given the UK a genuinely modern, exportable helicopter again, and in a more popular size class to the Lynx. The naval Lynx was particularly popular twenty years ago, due in part to navies using them off smaller ships (e.g. enlarged Corvettes and converted old destroyers that had limited helo facilities). Nowadays, navies are buying ships that are fully capable of carrying larger helos, but many struggle to buy expensive helos like the Seahawk, Merlin or NH90.

Basically, I am all for cancelling Lynx, it is too small for the genuine requirements. As long as we switch to a different AgustaWestland product, the UK shouldn’t lose out – an AW149 production line would most likely be in the UK anyway!

The problem with switching to an AW149 fleet is the time scale, from the above posts construction of the prototype is already underway for an ISD of 2013…the AW149 as far as I can tell is still little more than a proposed evolution of the 139. So the whole process would have to start from scratch with someone having to pay for the development costs …something that’s already been done with the Future lynx

One of the sad facts about CAS is the horrendously titled Friendly fire, or the marginally more acceptable term blue-on-blue.
These are occurances that happen with a pilot in the air with an overview of whats’ going on. I shudder to think how many times the Mk1 eyeball has prevented such an catastrophe.

To take the human element out of the loop, or have the human element miles (10s, 100s or 1,000s) away with the limited field of view that a camera provides is quite frankly scary. And could easily be a recipe for disaster and the loss of lives that a Mk1 eyeball on the scene with a full range of view would prevent.