Not familiar enough with T-6 acquisitions to be able to speak to them.
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Hot new helicopter/rotorcraft news
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
Those are just their BD guys. Might have helped them shape the requirements and shape their proposal. But former O-6s aren't going to buy you that much influence.
Not been pitched.
The AF however does their post T-6 helo track in beautiful 100% zero time refurbished TH-1H’s with Garmin glass cockpits and rotor dynamics from Bell 212’s. Beautiful machines. VFR and full IFR + NVG. Gold standard helo training.
This is something the HSC community has pitched as a way to bring MH-60S's back to the fleet in the most recent (May?) community missive.
T-6 was a result of the JPATS competition, Joint Primary Aircraft Training System, which as the name implies was a 'joint' acquisition. As far as I know the Navy is doing its own thing when it comes to selecting a helo trainer.
Yeah, retired O-6's aren't that big a deal at all WRT to procurement in DC. At all.
On the topic of the T-6, the Leonardo/Augusta/Boeing AWMH139 mashup, and in the context of buy-here procurement- the T-6 started out as a Swiss airplane. Beechcraft of Kansas sort of adopted it and got rights to build a derivative. Then they made it heavier, slower, needing longer runways, but otherwise equally capable (g limits, 0/0 ejection seats, fully aerobatic). Voila, they won the JPATS competition in the 1990s. Fast forward about twenty years to the A-29 debacle, which is a squabble over Brazilian airplane to be built under license in Florida. One of (then) Hawker-Beechcraft's main stall tactics was a PR campaign that it would be unpatriotic to buy a foreign airplane for the light turboprop attack mission. Sort of a "throw poo at the wall and see what sticks" strategy. They were going through bankruptcy at the time, so there was probably some desperation to get more revenue streams.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
I thought that was amusing too but the Kansas Congressional delegation pushed that line hard too, hence the debacle.
Yep. I still shake my head thinking about it, but I guess that's politics.
Community missive from where? PMA?
Where are there Navy station SAR aircraft now, anyway? The Marine Corps got rid of most of theirs awhile back except for Yuma.
