Sooo SEXY!



 

I remember playing a game called "Comanche Gold" in the 90's that was a flight sim for that bird....so cool!!

 

As has been said Comanche Gold

When they started things like planning on max pilot weight being 150 lbs,you knew it was doomed.
 

btdt  was cool

So the Comanche meant to replace the OH-58 gets cancelled in 2004 and its replacement the ARH-70 gets cancelled in 2008. In the meantime the OH-58F recently has been built to extend the service life of the design to 2025, and a Block II version of the OH-58 was submitted for the latest replacement program as the Armed Aerial Scout...

Is it the case the Comanche would have been cheaper to keep at this point?

Almost invariably they cancel a program just as the development costs are ending, making a decision based on sunk costs, not incremental ones.

Exactly what you SHOULD NOT do.

The did it with the F-22.  They did it with DDG-1000.  And they did it with the ARH-70.  Comanche... they probably got close, but it still wasn't field-able when it was cancelled.

Yeah well too bad the fucking Army changed the requirements over and over and over again. That bird had a specific mission - then every general that took over the project added more and more shit to it.

So instead of a light, fast, nimble, stealthy scout bird that could penetrate the most awesome integrated air defense system in the world (the Russians) and destroy extreme high value targets with its limited missile load out it became a bloated, slow, unstealthy and completely fucked bird because the Army refused to change any of the flight characteristics while piling more and more shit into it. Basically they tried to make it into an Apache light.

I worked right across the street where they assembled the first four LRIP airframes. The first production bird was like 90% complete when they cancelled the project. The government paid almost $2 billion in penalty fees to SIkorsky and Boeing for that cancellation which occurred only a few months after they signed the initial production contract. SOmewhere I think I may still have a picture of LRIP airframe 3 sitting in a dusty corner of Ft Eustis looking very forlorn- I ran into it when down there for validation of repairs to a full composite blackhawk tail cone. If I can find it I will post it up.

I could tell horror stories when I was on that project. Here is one: We here at Sikorsky had an ongoing competition for ANY idea that could save weight- the more weight saved the more the company would give you for a bonus. Ideas that were accepted- removing washers from hardware stackups (saved about 4 pounds), putting one less coat of primer and paint on the bird (saved about 3 pounds), redesigning the rivet pattern by increasing rivet distance about 2mm from each other (saved about 7 pounds). Dont even get me started on the massive redesigns of that bird because of shifting army requirements- we wanted to feed a bunch of two stars into a wood chipper feet first.

This program could have been used as a chapter in The Pentagon Papers. Again- great concept, great bird, great program in the beginning- then the scope creep started and just killed it.

I thought that thing was called a Z-19.    

Interdasting



Hope you find the photo





 

We are not talking boats here...



 

AH-64 is mo sexy.

This is not my picture but I did find one on the web. This is LRIP airframe 3 - it was partially skinned and wired as I recall. SOme dynamic components were in it. IIRC they simply riveted on any of the preformed skins to close it up per Army directions before we stuck it on a flatbed and sent it away along with all of the tooling and jigs.

http://blogg.forsvarsmakten.se/blackhawk/wp-content/blogs.dir/32/files/2012/02/41.jpg

This is how I remember it sitting in the corner a few years back when I was down at Eustis.

Sad... she wanted to fly...

I'd like to see her mouth being fish-hooked.



 

Absolutely untrue. It isn't sunk costs they are worried about, it's life-cycle costs. Oh, by the way guess how much a DDG-1000 costs to build? It isn't the three billion that was advertised, it's more than double that!

 

Me too. God that was a fun game.

Had to pop in on this rotor wing goodness.

I'll try and find the slides from my dads collection I got when he passed. I have a bunch of AH-56 Cheyenne pics from the early 70's. He was the test director for the program at Lockheed. We stated out in southern Cal. when the rigid rotor testing was being done out at Rye Canyon rotor test facility and then we moved to Yuma AZ for the flight testing. Most of the pictures you'll find on line of aerial flight shots were taken by me father from a king air beech chase plane. I've got slides of the bird on the ground with all it's munitions laid out....impressive. Also impressive was the ability of the "pusher prop" to be reversed to allow a fairly steep nose down hover and backing maneuver. This allowed it to pop over a rise, ID targets and back up to cover. Then hop over again. The arming computer at the time was state of the art.....but by today's standards not so much. I remember seeing the report from a mock computer battle between the bird and a destroyer......Cheyenne won due to munitions and maneuverability.

9 birds were built, only 8 survived testing. Long sad story about the crashed one and the crash investigation....I still remember dad coming home at 1am. The pull down from the Vietnam war killed the funding, so never went into production. One of the birds was rolled (barrel roll) to prove the viability of the new rigid rotor design. Army test pilots were called APS since they were "army evaluation pilots" and I have a picture with dad handing one a banana from the tarmac into the cockpit. Funny thing, later in life, I took my son to the final Williams AFB show/base closing and met one of the Apache drivers who's dad was one of the APS. Small world. The assistant test director who worked under my dad went on to McDonnell Douglas and was involved with the Apache program and development.

Give me some time and help from the wife with her slide scanner to up load to the computer and I'll post them up.

Got to set in a sim that was 1:1 scale.  I got to play with all the tricks it had on board.  One of my best memmories from the Army.