La Rouge Beret
Donor
AHC have the ADF deploy their Tiger ARH to Afghanistan. How does the orphan fleet perform and how many could the ADF deploy at one time?
I have to also ask if this is a case of AUS copying the UKs standard way to muck up perfectly good US aircraft by specifying a different engine?
It looks like the ARH Tigers replaced UH-1s and OH-58 Kiowas. And their successors might be OH-6s.
http://australianaviation.com.au/20...ght-helicopter-for-special-forces-on-the-way/
Well, all three choppers - UH-1, OH-58 and OH-6 - are armed helicopters, since all three derive from civilian machines: MD-500, Bell 205 and Bell 206.
By contrast the Tiger is a full blown combat helicopter right from the drawing board. It is no insult to the Tiger, nor to the ADF, to note that a combat helicopter is probably far more complex than an armed civilian chopper.
and surely enough, France replaced Gazelles with Tigers, yet armed Gazelles are still used in Africa because they are dirt cheap to fly, deploy, maintain...
Also armed Mi-8s vs Mi-24s.
Apache is expensive and a maintenance hog. Super Cobra is cheap, but it is small and light (even with massive evolutions, it remains the first combat chopper ever designed, 55 years ago). The Tiger is somewhere in the middle.
Keep the helicopters in the RAAF and it would be flying in Afghanistan, the Army just doesn't seem to get operating sophisticated aircraft is a fundamentaly different game to driving M113s.
As for why, Thales was going to close operations in Australia if there was not a critical mass of business. Buying American would have given us a helicopter that the Army still couldn't deal with and cost us local manufacture of an array of other Defence equipment and ammo in particular.