The country is unstable, not really wealthy and filled with groups/warlords that are eager to gain power. You wanna add more weapons? The only solution is NATO/UN backed force to make it stable. All the funds should go to rebuilding, reducing poverty and raising living standards. The nation can not buy or maintain 70 era fighters. It will cost decades to rebuild the airforce. And what will it bring if they start bombing their own territory? Civil war. Let the correcting to foreign forces. They invaded to crush terrorism. Let them finish it before running away.

The aircraft would go to the central government, not the warlords. If the central government, presumably elected, doesn’t get control over the warlords, who aren’t elected, you don’t have a democracy. You don’t even have a nation state. Notice that they’re not asking for fighters but for ground attack aircraft and gunships. No doubt they understand that if they do have to fight the warlords over the next couple of years, they don’t want it to be a fair fight.

NATO is a crutch, but it’s not a cure. Right now the NATO force is in kind of a holding pattern. If some kind of trouble breaks out between the warlords and the central government as the central government attempts to expand its control , you will probably not see a surge in NATO troop levels.

And pumping money into the countryside on infrastructure doesn’t make much sense if the warlords can divert it to their own uses, or if any guerilla force can simply blow it up once it’s built. We’ve already seen how that’s worked out in Iraq. Money just goes missing.

The A-10s make a bit more sense, but spending too much on military material instead of infrastructure, which afghanistan needs rather more, makes little sense and would probably lead to a backlash.

Infrastructure won’t be an issue if they can’t maintain security. This isn’t a country like some others over the years that spend gobs of money on weapons without having any real enemies, internal or external.

One of the questions somebody has to answer is whether it’s worth giving them the full spectrum of modern equipment and training them how to use it, to just leave them to fight the remnants of the taliban ak-47 to ak-47.

Perhaps not, but it’s still quite boring if the gearbox slams down through the roof during hard landings or if the rotor is separated from the aircraft due to excessive back pressure on the stick…

Dunno about those problems. I’m just saying a lot of people seem to still operate them, including the U.S. government and military.

Australian Cites Unidentified investigators on Cause

The Australian has an article citing what “military accident investigators believe” caused the crash. How good their sources are, we do not know. Please do not click on the link of you are too sensitive to read the speculation/story contained therein:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12169679%255E401,00.html

Now maybe you can see why I, and quite a few others, got pretty pissed about it?

And maybe, just maybe if you’re brave enough, you’d like to go onto the Military Aircrew forum on PPRuNe, and tell them why you don’t think it’s a problem? They’ll tear you a new ar$e in ten seconds flat. 😡

People get pissed about all sorts of things on a public forum. That’s why I gave up both complaining about what other people write or worrying about satisfying every single person’s sensibilities long ago. Too much irritation. Like I said, whatever the forum moderator’s rules are I’m more than happy to abide by them.

As for the military aircrew board at PPRuNe (I don’t know what that is), whatever they want to do in their forum is their business. If they want to come here and flame me that’s up to them.

[QUOTE=J The commanding colonel said he also has a few Blackhawks at his disposal but he liked the Hueys because they cost him a lot less to operate and were just as good for ferrying parts and flying the 80 miles back to base with people and supplies.[/QUOTE]

That’s the thinking behind the upcoming LUH competition. Have something cheaper to run than a Black Hawk for times when the Black Hawk’s size isn’t needed.

Remanufactured hueys are expected to be in the competition, with Bell promising to deliver each one at 3 million a piece.

BS…

But if a twin engined helicopter loses an engine, it does not land on one engine, unless you’d admit that the EH-101 can land on one engine only, too.

Seems like that would depend on how much power the remaining engine puts out and the weight of the aircraft. At MTOW, Sikorsky’s one engine rated at 3000shp will be carrying about 26,000lbs and the EH-101’s one engine rated at 2500shp would have to keep up about 34,000. Is that enough? I don’t know.

According to the press briefing, the Navy team was unable to find data indicating a difference in safety between three and two engines:

Regarding the three engines versus two, three engines obviously burns more gas per hour than two does. Those came into play. How big the gas tanks are. You can lift more because you have more horsepower. So, all the design trade-outs were very, very thoroughly evaluated.

Specifically from a safety perspective, we took a look to see if in fact a three-engine platform offered potentially more safety, and we could find no data. And we operate both three-engine and two- engine aircraft that do. So that didn’t turn out to be a specific advantage. But the overall size of the 101 clearly was a factor in terms of their capabilities.

Over $6 billion for 23 helicopters. The helicopter is already flying. And during the press conference, there was the following exchange:

Q: You said there’s some specific technologies in this helicopter, like security, communications, things that the president required. Is that technology available today in the military sector, or is that new technology entirely that has to be developed from scratch?

MR. YOUNG: You want to offer —

MR. LAUX: Sure.

We have a technology insertion plan. We’re certainly taking advantage of everything that’s available today and will be integrated with the known technologies. Over time we expect to be able to further integrate and collapse, if you will, four boxes into three, that kind of thing, as we go. But there are no communications technologies development as part of this program right now. We’re starting off with stuff — equipment that’s within the state of the art today.

So where is the money going? They need over a quarter of a billion per helicopter to get this thing up in the air?