Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: DMVIAGRA on April 03, 2012, 06:52:25 PM
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(http://www.chinook-helicopter.com/history/aircraft/australian/Australian_Chinooks_Ready_To_Go_a.jpg)
April 03, 2012
Military.com|by Michael Hoffman
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The Army plans to stick with its current helicopter inventory over the next two decades, opting to wait until 2030 at the earliest to revolutionize a fleet flown hard around Iraq and Afghanistan.
Army helicopters will receive upgrades over the next two decades, as they always have, but the austere budget environment has forced the Army to try and keep its current fleet in the air for as long as it can.
Army aviation leaders have gotten the message that helicopters don't sit atop the service's modernization priority list. Any money the service has in its shrinking defense modernization budget will go to new radios, the Ground Combat Vehicle and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.
Rather than fight a losing battle, aviation officials have sunk all of their political capital into keeping a next-generation helicopter alive. Army officials have built expectations for the program up to such a level they won't even call it a helicopter program. Instead it's simply called the "Future Vertical Lift."
Maj. Gen. Anthony Crutchfield, head of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence, outlined the need for Future Vertical Lift last year. He continued to fight for it here April 2 at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual conference, saying the service can't continue the never-ending cycle of upgrading its legacy aircraft.
The "legacy" is a long one: The Army is still flying the very first CH-47 Chinook helicopter it bought from Boeing and introduced into the fleet in 1962. The airframe has since been upgrade to the Delta model, and it now flies in the Washington National Guard since returning to a deployment in Afghanistan.
"The helicopters we have today eventually will be obsolete, no matter how much money we put into them," Crutchfield said.
He urged the aviation community to "speak with one voice" when it comes to budget battles -- or risk losing programs altogether.
"We are not going to get everything that we want, but we must get everything that we need," Crutchfield said.
The Army's one hope for a relatively brand new helicopter remains its "Armed Aerial Scout." However, this summer the Army will find out if it makes more sense to fund a service life extension program for its existing Kiowa fleet.
In June, the Army has invited potential vendors to fly the helicopters they would submit for the competition. Maj. Gen. William Crosby, head of the aviation program executive office, said he's tired of reading about industry capabilities in PowerPoint presentations. He wants to see them in the air.
Their performance will help the Army determine if it's worth the cost of a new acquisition program to build the Armed Aerial Scout, said Maj. Gen. James Rogers, head of the Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command.
Most of the funding dedicated to the Army's helicopters will go towards keeping the current fleet in the air. The Army has flown its helicopter fleet "six or seven times" harder over the past ten years than what officials expected when they were first built, Crosby said.
To save money, Army aviation leaders have had to delay planned upgrades to legacy aircraft such as the Chinook and the AH-64 Apache. Army budget planners pushed back the purchase of new rotor blades for the Chinook and delayed the purchase of the Apache Block 3.
Mechanics continue to fix the cracks that appear in the overworked airframes the military's depots. Crosby said what keeps him up at night is worrying about when a combat reset is no longer suitable to keep the legacy aircraft airborne.
"We're putting wear and tear on these aircraft that reset doesn't fix," Crosby said.
Army aviation officials have started to strip the paint off service helicopters and thoroughly test certain aircraft returning from combat to see if the stresses from war have gone beyond small cracks in the airframe, Rogers said.
"We're doing things that we've never done before … to try and understand what we're dealing with," Crosby said.
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http://www.military.com/news/article/budget-woes-leave-army-aviation-few-options.html?ESRC=eb.nl
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There simply is 0 money available anywhere. We need to bring our troops home before the budget cuts cost lives.
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See Rule #14
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Oh God, the Politics.
IN
Wow, still using the 1st Chinook delivered in 1962.
I rode in a few of them, every one had Hydraulic leaks, weird vibrations,
shakes. I loved riding in Helo's, but was glad to land every time when
riding in one.
They were reknown for transmission failures.
:cheers: Oz
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I have a nephew who works on Chinooks for the Alabama Army National Guard and they get requests from the Spec Ops units using Chinooks all the time to turn over aircraft to them in exchange for rebuilding the spec ops airframes because they are running out of aircraft and budget to keep those aircraft flying.
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Here we go.