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It’s not the pool of money, it’s the size of the fleet for implementation. There are ~80-85 aircraft across 4 battalions that SIMO is responsible for after the H6 guys, and those don’t really require anything… that’s not even half the aircraft in a regular active Army CAB. SIMO can test...

I would love to see the CABs adopt a workout cycle more akin to you guys going to the MEU decks for months prior to and not trying what we normally do of “maintain everything at all times” that results in maintaining almost nothing. The unpredictable nature of deployments though just make that...

180 day currencies will be the factor that like our shipboard ops requirement are just abandoned by conventional CABs as unsustainable. It will take a lot to shift the conventional Army outside a few locations to allocate white space on a training calendar to make these events a thing. You’d be...

Are you shitting me? They figured out how to put wing tanks on us that we can take into combat.... 5 hours of not moving between FARP trips woot dead ass.

No idea of there is a specific pipeline for it. Are you looking to revert to warrant or stay an RLO? Medical branch would allow you to go fly helos (60s/LUH) without going warrant. Otherwise your a general aviation branch officer, and most likely win them now going fixed and helo pure in the...

No different than the Army Bell 206s. We had I think now 3 total crashes attributed to Uncommanded flight control inputs but 8 million dollars of Bells money says that problem didn't exist. Boeing did the same thing with the Apache. Crash in early testing where every Test pilot was screaming...

Checking with a safety center hawk guy, the count was 5 crashes directly attributed to it. Comes down to insulating fly by wire systems from HIRTA which wasn't much of a concern and then exploded with modern tech. its the same reason we can't use our back up fly by wire control system in the 64...

We lost a lot of Hawks early in service with the Army because of a mechanical design flaw. The stabilator would schedule full down suddenly due to the i shielded electronics controlling the position of the stab. At a hover or low speed this isn't that big a deal but with that massive stab full...

Flash Bang on steroids. Basically it goes off more than one way so it has a greater total effect against the defensive force inside a closed space.

The guys we worked with (Rangers, MARSOC, ODA, etc) all had cool guy helmets which blanked out the 9 bangers and muffled gunfire but amplified whispers and directional speech. Totally cool stuff to play with. Talking with the 2 guys I work with from the 6th SOS in AFSOC they both have the same...

If the snake eater special guy helmets survive when they are operating off ships like that there has to be a way to harden up the same gear and get it into a flight helmet. Just seems unbelievably short sighted to not pursue this more widely when nearly every major civil aviation group has...

It really is ridiculous that all the snake eater cool guys and all the special airframe guys in AFSOC get special noise cancelling headphones. Normal Aviation... meh fuck those guys. And we wonder why every crew chief E7 is deaf as hell.

The Army has taken a novel approach to hearing loss.... They arent qualifying it as disability anymore. Boeing has also published a paper saying that our hearing protection in the 64 is inadiquate due to the frequency of the sound not just the dB level. The back seaters head is 5 feet from a...

Gator there are still a lot of L's in the War Stock. Im honestly surprised since all it needs is a platform with an INS transfer alignment capability and a laser to look at that more platforms havent come shopping to use them. UAV's seem like they'd be a great customer for the system since a...

Wow... Ive never even seen a B model. Then again nobody knows what the L models are gonna do with how old they are. I watched a C do its best impersonation of an ICMB. That was pretty much the end of that Lot. We are actually running into issues with ranges just because the SDZ on a SAL II...

How's the Marine side doing on Hellfire's? I know we stopped shooting our C models due to them failing badly at live fires to the point of being unsafe. Now the F models all seem to be running out of shelf life but we had already expended a lot of them in the last 10 years so its not a huge loss.

JAGM in some way shape or other name has already fallen apart before the finish line 3 times now. Thats what makes me uncomfortable about "F, it lets go all in" on this hand. It is funny that we are essentially asking for Brimstone/114L's with slightly better capes and acting like its a...

The T5 is as good right now out of the box as some of the thousand dollar Pro level D cameras were only a couple years ago, so it'll get results. I recommend you go out sometime in low/poor light and learn how to shoot with it using shutter priority (the P on the dial) without flash. You need a...

Great shot. What kind of glass are you shooting with?

I just want my MPSMs back. I dont care if they do produce duds, the damn things worked. And a longer range missile. Hellfire is having the same problem TOW did when the Radar directed AAA started showing up on the battlefield. It just hasnt got the reach we are gonna need when we start fighting...

They've done test fires of the system.... Awesome doesn't even begin to cover it. The little lethality butterfly charts were just sick. If they could give us that, and change our Target State Estimator to using GPS derived altitude or height above ellipsoid instead of a flat earth model that...

Everything the users in the community want (IR pointer integration into FLIR, 30mm air burst, multi warhead missile, etc) has been pushed back over and over again. What we got paid to get was an instrument suite (full ILS... But no GPS) and all the ways to get people involved in the decision...

So at current we have 3 different datalinks installed with a 4th being fielded in our next Lot upgrade due out this summer. 1. Longbow Net. Essentially this is a 64 specific data network that can be set up on any of my 5 radios. Allows me to pass text messages, targets and control measures with...

Pretty easy to break the "not worth it" mark when your talking about mid 60s/70s helicopters. Now days these things cost millions of dollars so its harder to write them off but back then they were just expensive jeeps as far as the Army was concerned.

*Break Break* Any Cobra or Huey guys with APKWS experience, I need to have a conversation with you off line. The Phil AF is acquiring the system for use on their AW109s and they need a whole mess of laser/weapons operational procedures SMEEs before they try and use this thing at Balakatan next...

In a lot of those cases the aircraft were written off vs attempting to recover and restore them to flying status. Things like a forced landing level event but either due to the damage incurred by the PL'ing in the jungle wherever possible the payoff just wasnt there to try and either fix the...

The 117s out at Tonapah in the 80s would be a great example of how services can keep something completely under wraps even from most of themselves. Having been briefed on some of the more obscure corners of USASOC's makeup, there are units within the Regiment (but not the standard 1-4 Bn's)...

Im calling BS on that rumor. Lots of stuff still being used with the group I was working for over there and that was almost a year later.

Pretty much prime examples of a design concept being outrun by the march of technology (especially XB-70). ICBM and Cruise Missile go from drawing board to viable and suddenly Valkyrie makes no sense. F-108 (and later YF-12) would be another great example of "hey guys its cool but you should...

As to the stores train. It was a completely viable delivery method hampered by the technology of the time. Just like every other major mechanical/electrical evolution in aviation at the time the design was a sound path to go down, it just needed another 10-15 years of mechanical engineering to...

AH-64A - Had an electrical anomaly in the family. Essentially the aircraft would inadvertently discharge voltage from the initial power spike coming up on electrical. There were a couple instances where Rockets and/or Hellfires were inadvertently launched off parked aircraft from either coming...

For the Cobras... 1. Are you getting or do you have a laser spot tracker? We use the crap out of it for handovers though our new data link ability you don't need it. 2. Lacking that can you slave your sensor LOS to a grid and altitude like we can? 3. Can you pass a grid digitally and save it...

This is the reason that until the E model we never wanted to be the guy to sparkle or rope anything. I have no magnification because the IZLID is mounted on the gun. The gun automatically elevates for range.... so the IZLID is never where the TADS is looking. The E model fixes that finally and...

Typically lead just flies how he would fly and trail is in NVS Free/Combat Cruise. (IE get behind him enough to keep him within a comfortable field of view, altitude and distance to provide immediate cover on his tail. Sometimes we will limit you to a side, but thats all METTC and all. Escorts...

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If you've seen that ugly thing on the nose... Spiny part on the top is the Pilot Night Vision System (PNVS). 30x40 degree FOV. 120/second slew rate. Goes 90 degrees left and right. That's the primary flight sensor. It has no magnification. TADS is the big bucket with 2 eyes on the bottom. 1 side...

How do you fly.... On FLIR. How is that harder? Nav lights aren't something we care about because why would I be that close to what I'm protecting? With the magnification of the target sight thats like trying to do CQB with a 300 win mag.We fly with goggles, but not as a primary sensor. It's a...

Two words to solve the boat problem.... Unitary Warhead. Find a way to mount something like ASROC with something like a unitary MLRS rocket. That or an air burst with the new 13X series LGBs Raytheon just briefed us on. Eventually there are just too many damn boats. Plus, A big warhead like that...

We do have an advantage over the Skids in having a lot more gas and legs especially now with the 100 gallon wing tanks that are approved for combat missions, but again its a solution in search of a problem. The only place that would really make a difference would be somewhere that you somehow...

It was telling the first time I tried showing a Standardization Pilot (kind IP) a copy of the LHD specific NATOPS and getting a look of "why does this concern us?" Lots of institutional stupidity or unwillingness to realize we are guests on the boat. And yeah the monocle is our primary flight...

Bitchen Photo Op mostly... I've heard a lot of "good theories" on why we would put 64s on a boat. Biggest one that made sense was rapid deployability. If I can just get ferried across a body of water it saves me days of pulling apart and putting back together for Strat-Air. Plus we are trying...

Thats kinda the issue with the aircraft. There is no room in the cockpit for any additional survival gear beyond what you can physically wear. We had to rig them out with the full overwater kit (shark tacos, inflatable raft, etc) but all that stuff is 20 feet behind you locked in a tail...

Army requires Horse collars and bottles for any over water flight in all our Helos. Only guys that really use them regularly are the Korea and Hawaii units and any coastal Guard guys. Riding the Helo into the water just scares the hell out of us though. Its hard enough to unass that aircraft...

Depending on sink rate of the aircraft in question... You may not make it out in time. Sink rate on the 64 is estimated at 10 feet... per second. So I timed myself in dunker and it took me about 10-20 seconds to breach the surface. Thats a long damn swim.

Philippines = Phil's. Like Danes or Pol's they actually call themselves that. We got the word of mouth brief just because of the weird collection of guys on our team as well as the Task force. I don't think they've posted the gritty full release details of the investigation yet. I know the...

That's the brief we got. I'm teaching Phil's to among other things do the JTAC thing (gonna be a long road). Rule #1 you always have to know which way is north. Rule #2 you must always know where your friendlies are!

Ive got a Viper LtCol on my team out here that brought up this very point. Over and over again it is brought up at Redflag when they put a plan together "We want the Raptor to do X" and of course there is bitching. "Hey man we can only take like 2 bombs tops" "Yeah Dumbass but your the only...

They are the current record holder for Frat incidents despite the fact they are not flying the majority of the CAS missions in theatre since the 91 Gulf War. They also lead the fixed wing loss rate for aircraft in every conflict between Desert Storm and now rolled up in one group. That means...

That whole concept is a trip. Those guys are resupplied by the Phils driving a riverine boat by every couple weeks with a dingy full of shit they need and thats life for months on end. The parts of the bases Ive been too where they arent actively occupied look like something out of the walking...

Trying to rebuild Clark is folly. The only thing that keeps that place alive is that Crow Valley is the only place to go dropping stuff. The Phils dont even really own Clark anymore. The parts that are still sustained have mostly been handed back to the civilians, and the parts that arent...