How so?
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The Romeo and Sierra Saga
- Thread starter hscs
- Start date
The tailwheel being in the wrong position which tends to freak people out since now its "close" to the nets. No RAST capability, which also means the Navy had to come up with an additional system for getting the thing into and out of the hangar. Honestly if we were going to go Army retard on the airframe, we should have went full on and gotten rid of the godawful automatic fold system. That would have saved us a lot of hassle, rotor head weight, wear-and-tear, and MX woes.
Not seeing how those are big problems, can you elaborate? Sierras land on every US Navy ship class and spend the night on Carriers, Gators, and USNS ships every day of the year. Every aircraft has its gremlins and quirks (aka Sierra's fold system), but there are some advantages to the Army tailwheel configuration like weight savings and tail rotor protection during brownout landings that offset the disadvantages in my mind.
They can land on the ships, but the margin of error is much less now due to tailwheel position. Having been in situations that required use of the RAST, I can say that it provided significant benefit for helicopters landing on CRUDES. Actually the Sierra is only significantly lighter than say a Hotel because the Navy sacrificed a few thousand pounds of inherent fuel capacity. Unfortunately the aft tailwheel design introduced some other fun issues like airframe cracks. To the point where once a crack is repaired and the frame member shored up, the cracks re-appear farther down the frame. The tailwheel doesn't protect the T/R. It does provide a bit of extra margin of error in TERF landing profiles for lazy pilots. However the older tail bumper provided the same protection for a poorly flown profile, only with the added benefit of being able to identify when the landing itself went excessively out of parameters.
As far as mission impact, that's debatable. Having a quarter or more of squadron aircraft down for airframe cracks is a problem. The automatic blade fold system has been a problem since the -60B, it just results in more MX hours and flight deck hassle is all.
I'm not saying different is bad, what I am saying is that we ended up with a "new" airframe that in some ways has less capability than current airframes. And this happened because of the "on the cheap" deal that Lumpy mentioned. Its taken those 10 years of operations to finally get systems onboard that provide an improvement over the -60H. Imagine how much more capable we would be now if those 10 years didn't have to be wasted.
You make some valid points. But on the whole, I believe the MH-60S program is a qualified success and that says a lot coming from a Phrog lover. Some of those "on the cheap" deals resulted in getting a quality aircraft out to the fleet that actually works for its core missions (SAR/LOG/VERTREP) without accepting unnecessary risk to aircrews. Cracks got fixed without killing anybody (Thank God) and the handwriting has been on the wall for years about the Sierra's warfighting capabilities vs. the Hotel. Is anyone outside HSC-84/85 really surprised those squadrons are going away? Your points are salient in light of the original post about Light Attack Turboprops. SOCOM wants them, JOs want to fly them, nobody is too excited about paying for them. Sound familiar?
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This reminds me about a slide I saw once about the demise of the National Aerospace Plane. In short, at one point near the program's cancellation, DoD went to the USAF to ask its commands "who wants it?" The answer: "Everyone!" The response: "OK, who wants to take a cut from other programs to pay for it?" The answer: "Nobody!" The result? There is no National Aerospace Plane.