Lawman

It's had a lot of issues. For one when the Army bought it they pulled the ECS system out because Pilots don't need A/C.... Then they started frying avionics. Second the aircraft has an incredibly weak tail rotor when compared to other similar class helos. It works fine down in a good chunk of the states but in a scenario like say Mountain altitude SAR in Colorado it gets into loss of tail rotor effectiveness very easily. The French actually stopped flying them for a while because of this. It's only really starting to pay off now and break even with the investment provided it's job as a trainer goes off well. Still the cost per flight hour is going to be significantly higher than a 67 just on the grounds of keeping and feeding two motors. But yeah by comparison of other helo programs like ARH-70, the Marine Y/Z Huey program, and Comanche (our 12 billion dollar pile of shame) it looks like a model of success.

There are two students and one IP in pretty much every TH-67 that flies that day. Everything except Apache is also carrying three dudes. That was the big flub replacing Flat Iron Huey's with Lakota. There was the idea that if you responded to a crash and had 3 ambulatory patients you would get to pick 2. The fuzzy logic of justification being that Flat Iron spends 99% of its time being a taxi for broken airplane crews instead of actually doing Medevac.

The Comanche money was repurposed into the F model Chinook and M model Black Hawk and speeding up the retirement/rebuild of A model Apaches. Lakota was its own terrible program entirely. To buy an off the shelf non deployable aircraft to replace both UH-1 and 58 A/Cs in service and to give the states a more economical helicopter to do SAR/Medevac over the Hawk. But once we got a hold of it we ran it in the most ass way possible... And now it's becoming our primary trainer as we retire the 67 fleet.

Agreed. He/She wouldn't be allowed to compete in the Olympics because that wouldn't be "fair," but to call that out in the military and say women need to be at the same physical standard as men your a sexist.

It does look fun, but ammo is going to be a bear. Belted ammo isn't something people just keep in stock, and while yes you can use AR mags, unless they changed the design from the mil model it will eat the mags you use for it. Plus a 249 on magazine feed is just a jam happy monster from my experiences with them.

I'm guessing you've never seen Iron Eagle III? It was the villan's plane.

I don't think we want to start sending our Airmen into harms way in a plane that can be shot down by a P-38....

Your really just adding two major factors: Bullet Jump - caused by the wind impact vs the bullets spin causing it to move up or down dependent on direction of the wind Port/Starboard effect - where the bullet gains inertia in the direction of flight. Neither of these is a factor if you have any kind of weapons processor accounting for these factors. If the gun is mechanically traversed, or the sight adjusts to predict impact so you correct a hard mounted gun to achieve your desired point of impact you negate these factors. Outside that firing a gun forward vs firing a gun sideways isn't really too different. We see slightly wider dispersion on off axis shooting with our turret but it's not significant enough to call it a game changer. Mostly we avoid off axis shooting because it puts stress on the ammo drive carrier increasing the likelihood of a jam.

See that's the funny thing about JSF/F35 Nowhere In the Marines requirement for a Harrier replacement did 5th gen LO become a requirement. It was a 4.5 gen program (like super hornet) to get a VSTOL aircraft that could do more than bring a single 500lbs bomb and a laser maverick to the fight. It was only when they (Congress and the Pentagon) folded 4 programs together to the JSF that 5th gen became something that had to happen with VSTOL. So essentially we had a modernized digital age CAS specific plane in the works.... Then we decided to make it part of the do all Swiss army fighter that has turned into the biggest weapons program of all time.

I honestly think your going to start working against yourself with bigger bullets. Look at the 30 vs 20, you've got 70mm more casing and propellant to get that round to what is essentially the same muzzle velocity as a 20mm. Granted you keep it longer (like any bigger weight bullet will) but now step up again to a 40mm. How big is that casing going to have to be to get to 3500 fps. He old L70 round for the boffors was nearly 400mm long and it's actually slower than your round. Then start figuring out how big the gun to take that massive recoil has to be, oh and we want high rate of fire to give you a good beating zone vs dispersion so we need multiple barrels. No standard breech is going to handle that much chamber pressure while maintaining high rates of fire (gotta keep the breach locked momentarily to dissipate pressure or it might grenade). At some point you hit diminishing returns. Despite what most people would think thanks to pacific rim you can't just take the Gau-8 and multiply all the measurements x1.5 and make a 40mm avenger.

Your not going to get the kind of high velocity high density effect with a Bushmaster family of 30m, at least not the one off the Apache. Your talking 2640fps at the muzzle. It's a low velocity gun for us because you can only handle so much recoil on the gun cradle with it being a turret and not hard mounted. I try to tell people all the time it's less a gun and more a grenade launcher. Now it does give you lots of greater non/light armor ability when it comes to target effect. 4m burst radius with good fragmentation against soft targets, and enough thump to punch into light armor like a BMP and start fires/set off ammunition. We even have an air burst round in the works to get over the loss of fragmentation in that moon dust in Afghanistan (Test results are insane). Still end of the day it's not an anti tank gun. The 25mm on the Bradley/LAV will however chew up tanks (except front mantlet) with the AP loads. But if you've seen how big a Bradley's turret is, that's because the chamber and recoil requirements are so much greater with that guns recoil. The Bushmaster II is modeled off that but your talking a lot of gun to try and fit on a plane that isn't a cargo aircraft. Plus your not talking volume of fire like you get out of 200-300rd trigger pull burst. While we are playing hypothetical A-X program requirements, arguably with the Hawgs history slinging stuff like Maverick and systems like Brimstone or whenever we get JAGM out and working do we need to go as heavy concentration on the gun needing to kill a T-72 from high angle, or would it be better to take a gun that's effective against anything up to an MBT, more effective against softer targets (because explosions woot) and packs more ammo for the game while saving weight for stuff like missiles and gas.

Yeah as GP said above, it's not possible. One of the former Fairchild guys is on another forum and quashed this idea pretty well. Simply put there were literally rooms full of filling cabinets full of blue prints and production tooling designs to build the Hawg. And a factory full of guys with the knowledge and expertise on building it are all retired/extra retired. This stuff wasn't ever put on digits or filed away for posterity it was disposed of. You would essentially have to reverse engineer the current Hawg and design the factory to build it. With the way we run acquisition programs over cost the normal way I can only imagine how much we would bolo that up.

I'm guessing he forgot the cardinal rule of "don't talk to the press.... Ever."

The really F'd up thing about it.... While we sit here and tell our own servicemen and congress that such an aircraft has no place in a low intensity insurgency type fight, we are simultaneously sending guys from the 6th SOS to countries in Africa, SA, and Asia. Where we are having them convince those countries they are exactly what they need and not to piss money away on Vipers or Eurofighters to fight guys camping in the jungle with AKs and making IEDs.

Why? It's obviously working out for me. I mean it's not like there are any women or minorities that outrank me or anything..... Such a crock of shit.

I think you missed my point on precision. Yes you sling low CDE weapons, and caveat from a BSO decision making point of view impressions on CDE have more to do with the decision process than reality, like when they took away our Hellfires because unguided rockets had smaller warheads (no kidding).... But you don't do it any kind of significantly better than a dozen platforms also slinging those weapons. Twenty years ago, when pods and FLIR hadn't matured to where it is today, yeah eye ball to eye ball get the Hawgs in here. But with the stuff on line today and stuff like Hellfire/APKWS/DAGR/Etc... It just makes so many aircraft capable of taking over the fight we keep saying the A-10 makes more sense than the F-35 in. And yes the Hawg per flight hour is cheaper than a 35 but that's not the point. Neither one of these aircraft should be sucking money up to what amounts to airborne QRF/fires, it's overkill. Think about what qualifies as "troops in contact" right now. We don't need Hawgs (or my 40 mil Apache for that matter) to respond to 6 MRAPs taking sporadic small arms fire that happened 30 minutes ago. Yes your postured for the Infantry Bn making contact with a hostile Tank Company and needed armor smash right now but that isn't going to happen in these brushfire fights one side keeps using as proof we need to keep the Hawg around because of "efficiency." When you eliminate that huge chunk of the A-10 making more sense argument you are left with the 10 years from now peer/near peer fight. Combine that with we have money/personnel for one or the other not both and the Hawg starts making less and less sense. And we are back to the yes you can get low slow and under the weather but F-35 can do XYZ/high threat/etc that you can't. I think part of the problem is this fight has become F-35 vs A-10 not A-10 vs the rest of the inventory. And both sides are ignoring anything that hurts their argument. For every story of Hawgs getting in somewhere somebody couldn't you can point to stuff like that Buff in Iraq stopping an armored column as CAS with modern sensor fused weapons from the stratosphere or dudes on donkeys calling in bombs of a B1 because that's what they had available. In a lot of ways you guys are having the same fight we are having in the Army with divesting the Scouts and using UAVs and more expensive gunships to fill share the meat of that role. Are there situations where we will miss the 58 for its low cost efficiency and lower MX requirements, yes. Would we rather see a new scout vs no scout, yeah but there isn't any money for that. But to just fly general support recon like is happening right now the shadow is actually very good. And when it comes time to hit people we have it in gunships.

That's the thing, the tactics and the way the game works have changed. In the fight like Afganistan low CDE and precision while building the "pillars of targeting" are the name of the game. Outside the 3-10 mission or immediate TIC against US troops (and only US troops) dropping ordnance just doesn't equate to all the pros the Hawg has that other platforms don't (low level, low speed, massed gun fire etc). In many ways that 30mm much like the 105 on a Spectre or he higher CDE 500lbs bombs just generates too many unknowns to a Battle space owner whose entire world revolves around preventing CDE over killing bad guys. Right now the push in Army Aviation is getting laser guided rockets up and running because even the little 14 lbs warhead on the Hellfire is seen as overkill to a lot of commanders which is ridiculous. In many ways yes the Hawg is more economical to the situation than say an F-35 or a Strike Eagle but really every tool we have over there is overkill right now. For the mass of aircraft we deploy we only truly need a fraction of them for that once and a while situation (chauk valley in 13 for example) but 95% of the time some long legged loitering Reaper or some turboprop with a couple Hellfires/APKWS or the occasional 500lbs bomb would meet the GFC requirements. More importantly it would stop us from putting mileage on all these thoroughbred race horse fighters that we've turned into mules.

Same could be said for pretty much the whole of the West Coast. Oregon and Washington have some breathtaking places to live... Then you meet people from Portland and Seattle that are the embodiment of the left coast stereotype.

Smartest kid in special Ed..... What are we doing as a military when that is the brass ring we are aiming for.

A fun day trip you can take the kids too and drink... Kruzburg monastery down by Wierzburg. It's in a beautiful area up on a hill in the woods. They have great traditional German food and brew a spectacular dark beer. Great place to spend an afternoon relaxing and eating or walking the paths around it.

If your big on the history WWI battlefields are worth a look to, especially up in Belgium.

For skiing... Don't waste your time in Garmisch. Head to Innsbruck or further into Austria. Northern Italy is great too on the Dolomites, but it's a haul. I'd stay out of Switzerland unless you just hit the lotto that place makes expensive Euro countries look like the value menu.

With where you'll be, your closer to the French/Black Forest/Swiss area than anything else. Will you have your own car? Because while trains are great and all they aren't much cheaper than a rental and you won't have near the flexibility. Strasbourg isn't a long drive, good place to blow the day out and see an old stereotypical european city. Your also close to a few old castles. Burg Eltz is cool and about an hour drive. It's a very weird castle being very tall for its size so it looks like a fantasy novel cover vs the old flat wide castles of England. Black Forest this time of year can be beautiful if you head to the areas heavy with waterfalls. As for cities in Germany, the Porsche and Mercedes museums are in Stuttgart and here is the sino sinsiem museum down that way to. Very cool collection of all things technology so 50s cars, old trains, tanks, gets, the Concorde and concordski.

Worse. It will be a retired E-8 who spends the entirety of the class telling your E2/3s not to do something stupid like use a pay day advance to get rims or live pay check to paycheck, or how you can't bank on the money being there later so invest now. Of course they will have perspective having done all of that and more the entirety of their career and being lucky enough to become part of the paycheck of the month club.

When your embedded to support a unit you actually have to be embedded with that unit. Like I said, it tied a vehicle up permanently to provide trans for 4 guys who didn't want to sleep in a hard stand building and shower in a tent. That led to points where aircraft couldn't get parts expeditiously and slowed down operations because we now have 6 up birds instead of 7 etc. Bn commander finally put a stop to the stupidity but it's still a couple weeks of dumb. If you were an ALO you wouldn't tell your parent Brigade "here is my cell number call me with your questions" because your afraid to go to the field would you?