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posted by janrinok on Wednesday September 26 2018, @08:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump dept.

Ars Technica is reporting that the Italian-made MH-139 helicopter beat out two other bids to replace the UH-1 after the programme was put out for bidding.

Just in time to avoid the end of the fiscal year, the US Air Force has finally selected a successor to the aged UH-1 Hueys used by the Air Force's nuclear missile security force: the MH-139, a militarized version of the AgustaWestland AW139 from the Italian aerospace and defense company Leonardo. The MH-139 was a joint bid by Leonardo and Boeing and will be built in the United States at Leonardo's facilities in Philadelphia. The award this morning is for $375 million, covering delivery of the first four helicopters. But the overall program could be worth up to $2.4 billion, delivering up to 84 helicopters, as well as training systems and support equipment.


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  • (Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Wednesday September 26 2018, @08:18PM (1 child)

    by mrchew1982 (3565) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @08:18PM (#740440)

    The Marines that ride and fly them everyday still have a big hard on for them...

    I mean it's still tragic that 42 service members died because something went wrong, but as far as I'm aware those deaths lead to the discovery of flaws which were later fixed in hardware by the company or fixed in wetware with new training and maintenance procedures, so those deaths we're not in vain. Ideally those faults would have been identified before in testing, but as we all know it's impossible to fully simulate real life. Sometimes a bug can't be found until the end user gets ahold of it.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:46PM

    by VLM (445) on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:46PM (#741053)

    I don't know every crash, but the general V-22 theme is its too low powered and too fat, so they cut corners in weird places. Something like the highest pressure hydraulics in mass produced aerospace by a huge fraction are in the V-22, stuff that you can get away with on a 1000 psi system will kill people on a 6000 psi system.

    There are also some issues where they kinda whipped it together without the wind tunnel technology to really understand whats going on, again killing a lot of people. For example an efficient way to get killed in a helo is a slow vertical descent where you're sinking into turbulent airflow and it gets worse as you drop ever faster; the V-22 has that like any other helo but its 1000x worse. Some sprightly and studly strong helos can power right out of a stupid maneuver like that; fat and weak V-22 not so much its going down... Sort of like its not too hard to get killed in a stall using a WW1 biplane because they don't have enough thrust for their weight; whereas its kinda hard to die in a stall in a F-16 because in a few seconds you have a 1:1 thrust to weight ratio and nothing short of a spin can get you. Something like a study upgraded AH-64 is hard to kill in a vertical descent because its got enough raw power to escape; V-22 not so much.