I can remember reading that the Ka-50 WON the competition for the Russian Army attack helicopter – way back in the early 90’s.
Yes, it won, despite it lost the trail where both competiting choppers should find all targets on the battlefield. According to ex-head of Russian Army Aviation Combat Training Department, Alexander Railyan, Ka-50’s pilot managaed to find only two targets out of 25, while Mi-28’s crew found all of them.
Funny, but NASA’s experiment, during LHX program, supported this Railyan’s claim.
It also showed itself superior during exercises in the Russias far east – when, not invited to compete, Kamov shipped out a Ka-50 at their own expense – and it beat the Mi-28 hands down (or at least greatly impressed the military).
Never heard of that. Where did you read this?
Then it was suddenly announced that the Mi-28 was going to be procured – instead of the Ka-50 !!
It wasn’t suddenly. Head of the Army Aviation dreamed about “Su-25” just in the form of helicopter. But reality was that single-seat helicopter flying at extreme low-altitude over battlefield took too much of attention of its pilot to simply do the combat task and keep acceptable situation-awareness.
As Scar mentions – the single pilot workload of the Ka-50 mitigated against it – but another deciding factor was reported at the time.
This was the difficulty of transporting the Ka-50 in an Il-76 – due to it’s tall rotor mast – which made it difficult to strip down for loading into the Il-76.
Never heard of that, as well.
Sign In
