US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
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Depends on how you define "redesign". The difference is instead of tilting the whole engine in MV-22, it is only the drive shaft being tilted in MV-75. The impact is no hot gas blowing to the ground making it is safer for people to be near the aircraft, also less turbulance under the rotors.
However, the flight characteristic of transition and hovering is not changed. It is this characteristic causing most of the crashes. The bottom line is that tiltrotor craft has two lift centers while the load is in a perpendicular line, once an engine got into trouble, the lift is imbalanced at low altitude, there is no room for rebalancing the lift before the aircraft tilt to one side and crash. A helicoptor loosing an engine will still has the balance even though the lift drops, it will suffer a harder landing but less likely to loose balance.
Tiltrotor's problem is inheretive and can never be reduced to anywhere close to helicoptor. It has some favorable features but don't expect it to exceed the popularity of conventional helicoptor. I think this is the attitude of many people.
The difference is that China's work is more of "技术跟踪" (closely keep up tech knowhow) rather than committing to broad application. 镧影 R6000 is unmanned. AVIC's work has taken a long time but no production model. Not that they can't do it, but there is no commitment from customers (PLA).
X-76 differentiates MV-22 and MV-75 by folding blades. It looks similar to swing-wing design among jet fighters in the 1960s and 1970s. I don't see them separating themselves from other fighters as a different generation, but that is only personal opinion.
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USS Nimitz to the US Navy be like:
I'm sure that the US Navy has grown to love the kink of torturing older vessels (and certain submarines) by this point.
Is anybody else a little surprised about the operational tempo the US has been able to maintain during the opening phases of the Iran War? We've been seeing reports on poor availability and maintenance rates of US Air Force and Navy aircraft for years now, but first couple of weeks of this war have shown strike rates on par with the Gulf War... According to CENTCOM, over 5,000 targets have been struck as of March 12. That averages out to roughly 500 strikes per day.
Are we going to see a rapid drop off as airframe attrition comes into play or do you think the issues with airframe availability and maintenance issues might have been overblown?
Are we going to see a rapid drop off as airframe attrition comes into play or do you think the issues with airframe availability and maintenance issues might have been overblown?
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Strikes <> aircraft sorties. Lots of tomahawks were used and a single sortie of B52 can fire multiple JASSMs.
Good point. Though it is still a larger number of strikes maintained. I guess only time will tell how well airframes have help up over the course of this operation. Hopefully we eventually get info on how many sorties the carriers have been able to maintain.
Another explanation is US Air Force broke apart the existing structures and sent all the flyable planes to the theatre.
Occam's razor indeed. I suspect this to be by far the likeliest explanation.