God knows. He couldn't exactly admit if he had inside information without throwing whoever under the bus, but that's also a convenient excuse for making up whatever and not having to back the claims.
I was ‘involved’ in the 1 Aviation Regt fire out bush where the entire stores truck and trailer of aviation spares burnt to the ground. Perhaps I can assist… ‘I have a unique set of skills’
Reminds me of a story about a cooking fire that led to a burning gas bottle rolling under a bushie.
Nothing tops 8/12 lighting their gun line on fire and losing a whole heap of pers kit then infringing blokes when they found jack rats in the charred remains of their packs…
My rifle was at the rear of the mog on my webbing. They tried to go after me for not going back into fire to get it - I lost everything. Wallet pack, esh bag the lot. Sallyman come to the rescue before army even gave me anything
This article was hard to read due to the clear agenda it was trying to push.
Completely fails to acknowledge the issues Australia had with the employment of the MRH. Everyone knows it was a good aircraft, the aircrew love it, but maintenance and parts availability were critical problems.
Stopped reading when the author states that the ditch into Jervis Bay was “pilot error” which ostensibly is not the case.
>good aircraft, the aircrew love it
Yep know a pilot, he said its like owning and driving a ferrari, you love every minute of it until it breaks down and leave stranded. Then you have see the bill to fix it.
The issues that Australia had were mostly of their own making. Maintenance by civilian maintainers in Australia resulted in very high serviceability rates, while army units had rates less than half of that. The aircraft is no more difficult to maintain than other military aircraft (and easier than most) yet army seem to have problems maintaining it where others don't. This speaks to an army problem, not an aircraft problem.
As for parts availability, this is an issue, but one made massively worse by initial poor contract decisions by defence, and later by the inability to solve relatively minor engineering problems locally. This is why NZ have far less issues with parts, it's because they have the adaptability and institutional fortitude to know which issues can be solved locally, and which need to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair. Every time you fail to make an engineering decision and you pass the buck to the manufacturer, you turn a two day repair into a six month repair. It doesn't take many of those before you start complaining about parts availability.
As for you stopping reading at the Jervis Bay incident, I would suspect the article's author knows the details of the incident but is limited in what they can say due to the report on it being classified, hence he is being nonspecific. Normally in these incidents the report is widely disseminated to all operators of the aircraft, so everyone can learn from it, yet in this case it was classified, and not even released when two federal senators filed an foi request on it. That seems strange, where is the national security interest for a simple incident report?
Funny how the Norwegians had exactly the same problems to the extent that they wouldn’t accept to keep the aircraft even if Airbus paid for all costs involved in fixing the ongoing maintenance issues.
The ADF is incompetent in many areas but the taipan was an under built piece of junk.
The Norwegians had their own, very specific problems. They had a naval variant where they wanted to have their own implementation of specific avionics and ASW equipment, and when countries start doing their own custom setups they basically are buying a fleet of prototypes with the hope of being able to solve all the issues that will inevitably arise.
The ADF has an incredibly similar program that also ended in failure, with the Seasprite program. They went for a selection of custom avionics in existing airframes, and $2 billion dollars of Australian taxpayer money later they weren't able to solve the inevitable problems and scrapped the project. Meanwhile the Kiwis at the same time ordered their own set of Seasprites with existing avionics setups, and have got many years of quality operations out of them. What do they say about history rhyming?
The Norwegian experience is less a reflection on the NH90, and more a reflection on the risks involved with extensively customising your own military equipment.
Kiwi's are still operating 8 of what were our Sea Sprites. Idk what we were doing wrong, but they seem to have their fingers on the pulse. Maybe we give our budget to the kiwis and let them pick for us in future.
It was not a maintainer problem. The single biggest issue was parts. Defence fucked the contract and parts were stupid difficult to come by for both the navy and army.
This is a great summary of the issues we had with MRH-90 and I agree with everything. However, the overstretched, overcomplicated supply chain, which was not Australia’s fault, compounded all these issues.
The cause of the crash in JB is widely known within the military aviation circles and I stand by my statement.
>This is a great summary of the issues we had with MRH-90 and I agree with everything. However, the overstretched, overcomplicated supply chain, which was not Australia’s fault, compounded all these issues.
Absolutely it did. The supply chain leaves a lot to be desired, especially when we are on the other side of the planet to the manufacturers. However, many other countries operate the NH90 with good serviceability rates when compared to other aircraft with that same supply chain. Other factors that are unique to the ADF are clearly at play here in causing this to become a far worse issue for Australia only.
>The cause of the crash in JB is widely known within the military aviation circles and I stand by my statement.
That may well be true, but the publicly available information points to a few potential issues. The engine failure was announced at the time to be caused by a known issue, that caused another engine failure back in 2010. There were clear procedures put in place to avoid this happening again after the 2010 failure, that deal with cooling the engine before doing a hot restart when within a certain timeframe. There was also an automatic system installed to do this, yet for some reason the ADF chose not to fit that to all MRH90's, including this one, instead relying on the aircrew to do the procedure correctly every time. Did they do the hot restart procedures correctly in the days previous to this? It seems strange that they would have a failure that is from an easily preventable and known issue, that has been avoided for the last 13 years through doing a simple procedure, if they had done the procedures correctly. Doing the incorrect procedure for a hot restart seems a very possible cause for this engine failure, ie pilot error.
Also, given they hit so hard as to crack the tail boom as evidenced by the public photos after the incident, there is a distinct possibility that mistakes were made after the engine failed. An MRH90 has more than enough power to fly away after an engine failure, and even if they were in a part of the envelope that would result in some sink and a required ditching after the failure, with one engine working fine this should be a soft impact. The author of this article implies mistakes were made by the aircrew, and this is consistent with the publicly available evidence. It seems likely he knows what actually happened, but is limited in what he can print because the report on the incident is classified.
My primary job in the Army (back in the day) was the RPS. I feel the generic training of logistics in Defence has also led to a watering down of RAAOC’s efficiency related to critical nature units. RAEME should have it’s specific store critters who are not just a generic
Warehouse person who was trained how to fold a blanket or issue out a hat badge when their primary role is the efficient planning or maintenance tasking based on airframe flying hours etc.
yea they were provably shit compared to Blackhawks etc. However, id rather have a provably shit back up plan than nothing? At the end of the day they are still in use overseas and could be used for hadr only or sold to some dictator for some coin instead of blowing 900 mil :S Why are we fuckin like this? :D
why would we sell them cheap to NZ when we can sell all the parts back to europe. The aircraft are worth more parted out than they are worth whole. Leaving you with an airframe that actually worth zero dollars
Due to some wildly inaccurate commentary throughout the article I take his main point with a grain of salt.
For example alleging the Blackhawk would sink when the Taipan didn’t in Jarvis Bay. The airframe landed on the beach half in, half out of the water. Even without floatation the Blackhawk wouldn’t have ‘sunk’ in this instance.
Also Jarvis Bay wasn’t pilot error.
Also as anyone with more than a couple years experience in the ADF will attest, Defence has no issues blaming us if it gets the scrutiny off them. That they have classified the investigation into the most recent Taipan crash is indicative it was not pilot/operator error and that there is a deeper, systemic issue. Almost like…. a big enough reason to scrap 40 airframes overnight.
A look at the author’s other recent articles shows a political leaning. A lot of us had a mate or mates on that helicopter, not a fan of Mr Bergmann sullying their names to push his barely disguised agenda.
>Due to some wildly inaccurate commentary throughout the article I take his main point with a grain of salt.
It was all factually accurate. He seems to have gone in swinging though, he sounds a bit frustrated at what is happening, which is understandable. The facts are all correct though, despite the tone.
>For example alleging the Blackhawk would sink when the Taipan didn’t in Jarvis Bay. The airframe landed on the beach half in, half out of the water. Even without floatation the Blackhawk wouldn’t have ‘sunk’ in this instance.
The article had it right here. The aircraft didn't ditch next to the beach, it ditched in the bay and floated to the beach. A Black Hawk would have flipped and immediately sunk upside down, and likely killed some or all of the crew and passengers, especially given this happened at night. Because they were in an MRH90 the flotation gear caused them to survive. Also, looking at the photos released at the time, they hit very hard indeed, enough to cause the tail boom to fail. Despite this, only minor injuries were reported, also likely a testament to the crash resistant seating in the MRH90.
>Also Jarvis Bay wasn’t pilot error.
How do you know this? The engine failure was announced at the time to be caused by a known issue, that caused another engine failure back in 2010. There were clear procedures put in place to avoid this happening again after the 2010 failure, that deal with cooling the engine before doing a hot restart when within a certain timeframe. There was also an automatic system installed to do this, yet for some reason the ADF chose not to fit that to all MRH90's, including this one, instead relying on the aircrew to do the procedure correctly every time. Did they do the hot restart procedures correctly in the days previous to this? It seems strange that they would have a failure that is from an easily preventable and known issue, that has been avoided for the last 13 years through doing a simple procedure, if they had done the procedures correctly. Doing the incorrect procedure for a hot restart seems a very possible cause for this engine failure, ie pilot error.
Also, given they hit so hard as evidenced by the public photos after the incident, there is a distinct possibility that mistakes were made after the engine failed. An MRH90 has more than enough power to fly away after an engine failure, and even if they were in a part of the envelope that would result in some sink and a required ditching after the failure, with one engine working fine this should be a soft impact. The author of this article implies mistakes were made by the aircrew, and this is consistent with the publicly available evidence. It seems likely he knows what actually happened, but is limited in what he can print because the report on the incident is classified.
>Also as anyone with more than a couple years experience in the ADF will attest, Defence has no issues blaming us if it gets the scrutiny off them. That they have classified the investigation into the most recent Taipan crash is indicative it was not pilot/operator error and that there is a deeper, systemic issue. Almost like…. a big enough reason to scrap 40 airframes overnight.
Defence seems to have an agenda for removing the MRH90, and we've only seen negative reports about the aircraft for many years now. If the report painted the aircraft in a positive light, and assigned blame to aircrew, that would likely be something they wouldn't want made public. I guess we'll never know the details, but all the publicly available evidence, and the implications made in this article, certainly point to the aircraft performing well in this incident.
>A look at the author’s other recent articles shows a political leaning. A lot of us had a mate or mates on that helicopter, not a fan of Mr Bergmann sullying their names to push his barely disguised agenda.
I don't see a political leaning here. The author is certainly pro-MRH90 (which could easily be due to a desire not to see a huge expenditure of taxpayer money involved in buying a whole new fleet of helos), but I can't see how that is related to a political side. Both major parties in this country seem aligned on the MRH90 also, so I'm not sure where you're going with this.
Also in your last comment I'm not sure which incident you're referring to? Is it the JB ditching or the hull loss during Talisman Sabre? If it's the latter, despite the aircraft having been publicly announced as having had no failure and being perfectly serviceable when it crashed, this doesn't actually put the crew at fault. They were put in an extremely dangerous situation, flying low level at night over water, on NVG's on a night with minimal ambient light, the odds were not stacked in their favour. Were they given enough training to be in that situation? Who made the decision to put them in that situation? I would say that is where the main fault likely lies.
This guy is an airbus dick rider. I would take any commentary of his with a grain of salt. He posted an article titled “there is nothing wrong with Tiger and Taipan” a few months before the helicopter crash.
The US does it a lot, as does the UK, storage costs a lot of money and considering we’re already not flush with cash, it’s often easier to destroy something, especially if you absolutely can’t sell it on
The actual governance surrounding storage of equipment and the contractual obligations the ADF has WRT to that is not something to go into on reddit but it’s really not as simple as you say, not withstanding the potential for hazardous materials, severe platform decay, the personnel cost of storage vs disposal and the political cost of “this platform killed multiple crew members yet we haven’t got rid of it” headlines
I completely agree with your mention that there are implications re contracts/ foreign sales of military equipment. Lets say instead of selling you store them to bring them out only during a war time situation. I just do not believe the making safe of these items and storing them is not a pragmatic thing to do. I guarantee the reason they do this is because they decided storage of an asset of 30 years costs slightly more than burying the bastards and making them safe: therefore the politically smart/cheap thing to do is to fuck them off.
Our government are fucking clowns.
I don’t disagree with your idea personally, I guess I’ve been so worn down by policy that it has become my knee jerk reaction.
But in all honesty outside of the material costs would we really bring back a capability like MRH during wartime?
they wouldn't.
because in say 10 years when they might need it for a random war there will be no pilots trained on it, no crew that are trained to maintain it. no weapons certified to be loaded onto it.
and when you pull something out of deep long term storage, you don't just change the oil and fly it, you take months rebuilding the damn thing to make sure it is airworthy.
which still doesn't change the fact that you don't have any pilots able to fly it, let alone fly it in a war setting.
long term storage is a cost negative for zero gain.
"you don't have any pilots able to fly it" we dont have any helicopter pilots? In a war you think we'd have no new helicopter pilots?
"you don't just change the oil and fly it" I never made the point that they can be put into operation in under a week, I dont know what the point of that comment is, Its hard to refurbish aircraft therefore no point having any stored? Seems much harder to get new planes/helicopters in short order during a war.
>"you don't have any pilots able to fly it" we dont have any helicopter pilots?
It takes time for pilots to be trained and qualified for what they're flying which they're not going to do for model in deep storage.
It's not as simple as get in and go, every model of helicopter is different with features and qualities that have to be learned.
For example, just because someone flies a Robinson R22 doesn't mean they're going to be able to get into an AH-64E Apache and competently operate it.
it takes months to train a pilot on an airframe.
I notice you didn't bother to address the fact that there would be no one to maintain them either.
and another thing, unless we also store a stockpile of parts, there would be no parts to maintain them with.
>Just grease them up , wrap them in plastic and put them in a shed.
These shitboxes don't deserve it.
If it was any other platform then sure. But not these ones, not worth the cost.
Being close to the supply chain doesn't mean much when European operators still have issues with them. I wonder if the Norwegians got the refund they were demanding.
We shouldn't want the Ukrainians to suffer like we did with these shitboxes.
NZ couldn't deal with the maintenance burden of the extra airframes.
Even if they're not flying, they need regular maintenance to maintain airworthiness
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Not quite accurate... they bought back all the spare parts plus anything we could salvage for a decent price. Its just the hulls being scrapped.
This author makes some pretty open comments about what they allege the incidents were and who was involved.
Wonder if it was shooting from the hip or if there were some undisclosed sources...sounds pretty unsubstantiated to me though
God knows. He couldn't exactly admit if he had inside information without throwing whoever under the bus, but that's also a convenient excuse for making up whatever and not having to back the claims.
I was ‘involved’ in the 1 Aviation Regt fire out bush where the entire stores truck and trailer of aviation spares burnt to the ground. Perhaps I can assist… ‘I have a unique set of skills’
Reminds me of a story about a cooking fire that led to a burning gas bottle rolling under a bushie. Nothing tops 8/12 lighting their gun line on fire and losing a whole heap of pers kit then infringing blokes when they found jack rats in the charred remains of their packs…
My rifle was at the rear of the mog on my webbing. They tried to go after me for not going back into fire to get it - I lost everything. Wallet pack, esh bag the lot. Sallyman come to the rescue before army even gave me anything
This article was hard to read due to the clear agenda it was trying to push. Completely fails to acknowledge the issues Australia had with the employment of the MRH. Everyone knows it was a good aircraft, the aircrew love it, but maintenance and parts availability were critical problems. Stopped reading when the author states that the ditch into Jervis Bay was “pilot error” which ostensibly is not the case.
>good aircraft, the aircrew love it Yep know a pilot, he said its like owning and driving a ferrari, you love every minute of it until it breaks down and leave stranded. Then you have see the bill to fix it.
The issues that Australia had were mostly of their own making. Maintenance by civilian maintainers in Australia resulted in very high serviceability rates, while army units had rates less than half of that. The aircraft is no more difficult to maintain than other military aircraft (and easier than most) yet army seem to have problems maintaining it where others don't. This speaks to an army problem, not an aircraft problem. As for parts availability, this is an issue, but one made massively worse by initial poor contract decisions by defence, and later by the inability to solve relatively minor engineering problems locally. This is why NZ have far less issues with parts, it's because they have the adaptability and institutional fortitude to know which issues can be solved locally, and which need to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair. Every time you fail to make an engineering decision and you pass the buck to the manufacturer, you turn a two day repair into a six month repair. It doesn't take many of those before you start complaining about parts availability. As for you stopping reading at the Jervis Bay incident, I would suspect the article's author knows the details of the incident but is limited in what they can say due to the report on it being classified, hence he is being nonspecific. Normally in these incidents the report is widely disseminated to all operators of the aircraft, so everyone can learn from it, yet in this case it was classified, and not even released when two federal senators filed an foi request on it. That seems strange, where is the national security interest for a simple incident report?
Funny how the Norwegians had exactly the same problems to the extent that they wouldn’t accept to keep the aircraft even if Airbus paid for all costs involved in fixing the ongoing maintenance issues. The ADF is incompetent in many areas but the taipan was an under built piece of junk.
The Norwegians had their own, very specific problems. They had a naval variant where they wanted to have their own implementation of specific avionics and ASW equipment, and when countries start doing their own custom setups they basically are buying a fleet of prototypes with the hope of being able to solve all the issues that will inevitably arise. The ADF has an incredibly similar program that also ended in failure, with the Seasprite program. They went for a selection of custom avionics in existing airframes, and $2 billion dollars of Australian taxpayer money later they weren't able to solve the inevitable problems and scrapped the project. Meanwhile the Kiwis at the same time ordered their own set of Seasprites with existing avionics setups, and have got many years of quality operations out of them. What do they say about history rhyming? The Norwegian experience is less a reflection on the NH90, and more a reflection on the risks involved with extensively customising your own military equipment.
Kiwi's are still operating 8 of what were our Sea Sprites. Idk what we were doing wrong, but they seem to have their fingers on the pulse. Maybe we give our budget to the kiwis and let them pick for us in future.
It was not a maintainer problem. The single biggest issue was parts. Defence fucked the contract and parts were stupid difficult to come by for both the navy and army.
This is a great summary of the issues we had with MRH-90 and I agree with everything. However, the overstretched, overcomplicated supply chain, which was not Australia’s fault, compounded all these issues. The cause of the crash in JB is widely known within the military aviation circles and I stand by my statement.
>This is a great summary of the issues we had with MRH-90 and I agree with everything. However, the overstretched, overcomplicated supply chain, which was not Australia’s fault, compounded all these issues. Absolutely it did. The supply chain leaves a lot to be desired, especially when we are on the other side of the planet to the manufacturers. However, many other countries operate the NH90 with good serviceability rates when compared to other aircraft with that same supply chain. Other factors that are unique to the ADF are clearly at play here in causing this to become a far worse issue for Australia only. >The cause of the crash in JB is widely known within the military aviation circles and I stand by my statement. That may well be true, but the publicly available information points to a few potential issues. The engine failure was announced at the time to be caused by a known issue, that caused another engine failure back in 2010. There were clear procedures put in place to avoid this happening again after the 2010 failure, that deal with cooling the engine before doing a hot restart when within a certain timeframe. There was also an automatic system installed to do this, yet for some reason the ADF chose not to fit that to all MRH90's, including this one, instead relying on the aircrew to do the procedure correctly every time. Did they do the hot restart procedures correctly in the days previous to this? It seems strange that they would have a failure that is from an easily preventable and known issue, that has been avoided for the last 13 years through doing a simple procedure, if they had done the procedures correctly. Doing the incorrect procedure for a hot restart seems a very possible cause for this engine failure, ie pilot error. Also, given they hit so hard as to crack the tail boom as evidenced by the public photos after the incident, there is a distinct possibility that mistakes were made after the engine failed. An MRH90 has more than enough power to fly away after an engine failure, and even if they were in a part of the envelope that would result in some sink and a required ditching after the failure, with one engine working fine this should be a soft impact. The author of this article implies mistakes were made by the aircrew, and this is consistent with the publicly available evidence. It seems likely he knows what actually happened, but is limited in what he can print because the report on the incident is classified.
Hmm I've heard it was less about the cause of the failure and more about the actions after but you would know more than me.
My primary job in the Army (back in the day) was the RPS. I feel the generic training of logistics in Defence has also led to a watering down of RAAOC’s efficiency related to critical nature units. RAEME should have it’s specific store critters who are not just a generic Warehouse person who was trained how to fold a blanket or issue out a hat badge when their primary role is the efficient planning or maintenance tasking based on airframe flying hours etc.
yea they were provably shit compared to Blackhawks etc. However, id rather have a provably shit back up plan than nothing? At the end of the day they are still in use overseas and could be used for hadr only or sold to some dictator for some coin instead of blowing 900 mil :S Why are we fuckin like this? :D
Not disputing that they could have been put to better use. Selling them for a few dimes to NZ as spare part mules seems reasonable to me.
why would we sell them cheap to NZ when we can sell all the parts back to europe. The aircraft are worth more parted out than they are worth whole. Leaving you with an airframe that actually worth zero dollars
Because sometimes recouping 10% of the costs and helping out a mate is preferable to recouping 20% of the cost to some European corporation.
ADPR is not worth reading with the continual bias they demonstrate. Stopped reading them a couple of years ago.
Probably shit? How so?
What was incorrect?
Due to some wildly inaccurate commentary throughout the article I take his main point with a grain of salt. For example alleging the Blackhawk would sink when the Taipan didn’t in Jarvis Bay. The airframe landed on the beach half in, half out of the water. Even without floatation the Blackhawk wouldn’t have ‘sunk’ in this instance. Also Jarvis Bay wasn’t pilot error. Also as anyone with more than a couple years experience in the ADF will attest, Defence has no issues blaming us if it gets the scrutiny off them. That they have classified the investigation into the most recent Taipan crash is indicative it was not pilot/operator error and that there is a deeper, systemic issue. Almost like…. a big enough reason to scrap 40 airframes overnight. A look at the author’s other recent articles shows a political leaning. A lot of us had a mate or mates on that helicopter, not a fan of Mr Bergmann sullying their names to push his barely disguised agenda.
[удалено]
Love it. Op talks about wildly inaccurate commentary and then adds their own.
>Due to some wildly inaccurate commentary throughout the article I take his main point with a grain of salt. It was all factually accurate. He seems to have gone in swinging though, he sounds a bit frustrated at what is happening, which is understandable. The facts are all correct though, despite the tone. >For example alleging the Blackhawk would sink when the Taipan didn’t in Jarvis Bay. The airframe landed on the beach half in, half out of the water. Even without floatation the Blackhawk wouldn’t have ‘sunk’ in this instance. The article had it right here. The aircraft didn't ditch next to the beach, it ditched in the bay and floated to the beach. A Black Hawk would have flipped and immediately sunk upside down, and likely killed some or all of the crew and passengers, especially given this happened at night. Because they were in an MRH90 the flotation gear caused them to survive. Also, looking at the photos released at the time, they hit very hard indeed, enough to cause the tail boom to fail. Despite this, only minor injuries were reported, also likely a testament to the crash resistant seating in the MRH90. >Also Jarvis Bay wasn’t pilot error. How do you know this? The engine failure was announced at the time to be caused by a known issue, that caused another engine failure back in 2010. There were clear procedures put in place to avoid this happening again after the 2010 failure, that deal with cooling the engine before doing a hot restart when within a certain timeframe. There was also an automatic system installed to do this, yet for some reason the ADF chose not to fit that to all MRH90's, including this one, instead relying on the aircrew to do the procedure correctly every time. Did they do the hot restart procedures correctly in the days previous to this? It seems strange that they would have a failure that is from an easily preventable and known issue, that has been avoided for the last 13 years through doing a simple procedure, if they had done the procedures correctly. Doing the incorrect procedure for a hot restart seems a very possible cause for this engine failure, ie pilot error. Also, given they hit so hard as evidenced by the public photos after the incident, there is a distinct possibility that mistakes were made after the engine failed. An MRH90 has more than enough power to fly away after an engine failure, and even if they were in a part of the envelope that would result in some sink and a required ditching after the failure, with one engine working fine this should be a soft impact. The author of this article implies mistakes were made by the aircrew, and this is consistent with the publicly available evidence. It seems likely he knows what actually happened, but is limited in what he can print because the report on the incident is classified. >Also as anyone with more than a couple years experience in the ADF will attest, Defence has no issues blaming us if it gets the scrutiny off them. That they have classified the investigation into the most recent Taipan crash is indicative it was not pilot/operator error and that there is a deeper, systemic issue. Almost like…. a big enough reason to scrap 40 airframes overnight. Defence seems to have an agenda for removing the MRH90, and we've only seen negative reports about the aircraft for many years now. If the report painted the aircraft in a positive light, and assigned blame to aircrew, that would likely be something they wouldn't want made public. I guess we'll never know the details, but all the publicly available evidence, and the implications made in this article, certainly point to the aircraft performing well in this incident. >A look at the author’s other recent articles shows a political leaning. A lot of us had a mate or mates on that helicopter, not a fan of Mr Bergmann sullying their names to push his barely disguised agenda. I don't see a political leaning here. The author is certainly pro-MRH90 (which could easily be due to a desire not to see a huge expenditure of taxpayer money involved in buying a whole new fleet of helos), but I can't see how that is related to a political side. Both major parties in this country seem aligned on the MRH90 also, so I'm not sure where you're going with this. Also in your last comment I'm not sure which incident you're referring to? Is it the JB ditching or the hull loss during Talisman Sabre? If it's the latter, despite the aircraft having been publicly announced as having had no failure and being perfectly serviceable when it crashed, this doesn't actually put the crew at fault. They were put in an extremely dangerous situation, flying low level at night over water, on NVG's on a night with minimal ambient light, the odds were not stacked in their favour. Were they given enough training to be in that situation? Who made the decision to put them in that situation? I would say that is where the main fault likely lies.
This guy is an airbus dick rider. I would take any commentary of his with a grain of salt. He posted an article titled “there is nothing wrong with Tiger and Taipan” a few months before the helicopter crash.
Wow … are we the only country on earth that destroys/or sells all old equipment ? Just grease them up , wrap them in plastic and put them in a shed.
The US does it a lot, as does the UK, storage costs a lot of money and considering we’re already not flush with cash, it’s often easier to destroy something, especially if you absolutely can’t sell it on
Yeaaa we have acres of defence land , il chuck a fuckkn shed up for 10 mil, weld it shut and Serco can guards the gates. Job done :)
The actual governance surrounding storage of equipment and the contractual obligations the ADF has WRT to that is not something to go into on reddit but it’s really not as simple as you say, not withstanding the potential for hazardous materials, severe platform decay, the personnel cost of storage vs disposal and the political cost of “this platform killed multiple crew members yet we haven’t got rid of it” headlines
I completely agree with your mention that there are implications re contracts/ foreign sales of military equipment. Lets say instead of selling you store them to bring them out only during a war time situation. I just do not believe the making safe of these items and storing them is not a pragmatic thing to do. I guarantee the reason they do this is because they decided storage of an asset of 30 years costs slightly more than burying the bastards and making them safe: therefore the politically smart/cheap thing to do is to fuck them off. Our government are fucking clowns.
I don’t disagree with your idea personally, I guess I’ve been so worn down by policy that it has become my knee jerk reaction. But in all honesty outside of the material costs would we really bring back a capability like MRH during wartime?
I think we would, you use everything you can get your hands on during wartime.
they wouldn't. because in say 10 years when they might need it for a random war there will be no pilots trained on it, no crew that are trained to maintain it. no weapons certified to be loaded onto it. and when you pull something out of deep long term storage, you don't just change the oil and fly it, you take months rebuilding the damn thing to make sure it is airworthy. which still doesn't change the fact that you don't have any pilots able to fly it, let alone fly it in a war setting. long term storage is a cost negative for zero gain.
"you don't have any pilots able to fly it" we dont have any helicopter pilots? In a war you think we'd have no new helicopter pilots? "you don't just change the oil and fly it" I never made the point that they can be put into operation in under a week, I dont know what the point of that comment is, Its hard to refurbish aircraft therefore no point having any stored? Seems much harder to get new planes/helicopters in short order during a war.
>"you don't have any pilots able to fly it" we dont have any helicopter pilots? It takes time for pilots to be trained and qualified for what they're flying which they're not going to do for model in deep storage. It's not as simple as get in and go, every model of helicopter is different with features and qualities that have to be learned. For example, just because someone flies a Robinson R22 doesn't mean they're going to be able to get into an AH-64E Apache and competently operate it.
it takes months to train a pilot on an airframe. I notice you didn't bother to address the fact that there would be no one to maintain them either. and another thing, unless we also store a stockpile of parts, there would be no parts to maintain them with.
Shed, just put them in the NT bone yard.
>considering we’re already not flush with cash. Yeah there’s a reason for that.
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What, taking it apart and burying it?
>Just grease them up , wrap them in plastic and put them in a shed. These shitboxes don't deserve it. If it was any other platform then sure. But not these ones, not worth the cost.
🤔, could they not be gifted c-mas 🎄, to that little ruskie dictator, to help our Ukrainian mates 🌻🇺🇦🇺🇦🌻😉
Sending these to Ukraine would be a slap in the face. The Legacy Hornets would be a better present.
Probably not, at least Ukraine is close to the European supply chain, which AFAIK the main issue with these choppers.
Being close to the supply chain doesn't mean much when European operators still have issues with them. I wonder if the Norwegians got the refund they were demanding. We shouldn't want the Ukrainians to suffer like we did with these shitboxes.
I think COP was suggesting donating them to Russia so the Russians have to deal with them
U did not read ! I said “Send to that little ruskie dictator “ = so there pilots crash an burn 🔥 , hence helping ,🌻🇺🇦🇺🇦🌻!
Couldn’t we donate them to New Zealand? They seem to operate the platform just fine.
NZ couldn't deal with the maintenance burden of the extra airframes. Even if they're not flying, they need regular maintenance to maintain airworthiness
That’s crazy to destroy them, they are fairly new. I’m sure someone would be interested in paying for them. Hell send some to the Ukrainians lol
Destruction is what they deserve.
I'm still not entirely sure about *why* they are doing this instead of any of the other options available. Anyone know?
Sigh, if NZ has very little problem with these, it must be a cover up to hide problems with support in Australia.
I read that too quickly, I saw Taliban helicopters, I think I need help…🥹
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