None of the naval pilots have flown or assessed the current generation ALH. It’s sad that with 16 ALH in the pipeline, the Naval Project Team at HAL does not have a Test Pilot or a Test Engineer on its strength. The last Test Crew was posted to the project team some 6-8 years back and that too with no mandate to participate in the ongoing ALH flight trials. Compare this to the Air Force and the Army which have a dedicated team of Test Pilots and Test Engineers co-located with HAL flight ops. These test crew participate in all the flight trials and are abreast with the current progress on them, thereby keeping the respective Service HQs updated on the changes/progress made on each program and if required provide service inputs so that they are addressed at an early stage in the program. On the naval side, the role of the project team is reduced only to following up on the aircraft that come here for maintenance. There is no one to advise NHQ on what exactly HAL’s current capability is and how it has improved over the years. So, most of what you get is hearsay.
All the not-so-good comments that have been made recently are based on the ALH of the year 2000, and out of experience of operating the limited ALH (Mk1s) that are in the Indian naval inventory [.....] ALH was specifically designed for high altitude and some intensive manoeuvring which are exactly opposite to what the Indian Navy needed. Naval aircraft primarily need long period hover (time on station) and stability, which is the opposite of manoeuvrability. The design requirements were on the opposite ends of the spectrum hence there was no way that ALH would have met the NSQR. It’s easy to say in hindsight that HAL should have used a different rotor for the Naval ALH. As a nation in the 1990s we did not have any background in helicopter design, we were just learning to take baby steps, there was no margin within the project to make two different helicopters.
Also, the lead service for ALH were Army and Air Force (compare their numbers with Naval requirement); their requirements were for Siachen heights and an extraordinary requirement of a max 3.5 ‘g’ limit. The performance requirement was genuine however all other requirements were taken from other contemporary helicopters of that era (BO 105/BK 117). The 3.5 g requirement and battlefield survivability for controls were the major factors affecting the design of the rotor and the rotor head. To enable ALH to make such high ‘g’ maneuvers the rotor had a large hinge offset which was partly accomplished by the large rotor head. The large rotor mast also accommodated the controls which passed through the centre of the MGB. With a large rotor head, the ALH with its blades folded became too big to manoeuvre into the ship hangars.
