World's fastest military helicopters

Jeff Head said:

Well, the new AH-1Z Viper that the US is now building for the US Marines to replace the Super Cobras can reach 410 km/h in a dive and speeds of 233 miles per hour.

It's cruise speed is 185 miles per hour or 296 km/h.

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The two main reasons why the AH-1Z is significantly faster than any other Cobra version are obviously more hp and the altered rotor head, like you can see on the picture the actual beginning of the rotor blades starts far away from the fuselage and at the end of the stubbed wings, meaning there is almost no downwash factor that slows it down, only tips of the stubbed wings and tailboom are downwash factor, most other helicopters have no such extended connection between rotor head and rotor blades.

And dive speed is not really something needed to mention, a tank can reach 150-170 km/h in "dive" from a cliff, too. .

Black Shark said:

And dive speed is not really something needed to mention, a tank can reach 150-170 km/h in "dive" from a cliff, too. .

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Hehehe...there is one HUGE difference Black Shark.

A tank diving from a cliff cannot pull up...an attack helicopter can.

Dive speed for an attack helicopter can have its advantages.

Jeff Head said:

Hehehe...there is one HUGE difference Black Shark.

A tank diving from a cliff cannot pull up...an attack helicopter can.

Dive speed for an attack helicopter can have its advantages.

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Hehe, my friend ask the A-team they can

And Dive Speed has two main advantages, during dive helicopter stabilized and accuracy for unguided rockets and the recoil of big guns like on Mi-24P for example have a significant higher accuracy and the other advantage is dive maneuvers are great to accelerate the helicopters speed in very short time but there are some very small advantages like speed adds a little bit more kinetic engery to rounds for example 300km/h are about 80m/s for example to the average 960 m/s for 30x165mm 3UOF8 HE-Frag rounds, this speed difference is almost irrelevant for AP rounds but gives a sligthly higher AP capability to 3UOF8 HE-FI rounds which use a contact delayed fuze of 0.02 sec which was designed to have higher capabilities against soft or light armored targets like APC's and IFV's which gives it a more effective impact, exploding inside a BTR,Fuchs or Stryker instead of exploding on the surface of the armor and making mostly cosmetic damage, with impact delayed fuze it kills from inside instead from outside.

What i forgot to say was, speed has a huge impact on missiles Range performance.
ATGM's have average of 10km range heliborne launched while hovering, if a helicopter flies 300km/h this has an immidiate result in missiles range and speed performance.
ATGM's fly with 300 up to 610 m/s. When the helicopter already flies with 300 km/h (83.33m/s) the Missile itself starts to accelerate with its current speed (83.33 m/s) + the usual acceleration of the missile engine. To put it in numbers, a missile flying with 420 m/s in its average speed during the entire flight, while having a much greater initial boosting above 500/550 m/s and we have to add the 83.33 m/s leaving us 513.33 m/s average speed and (583-633 m/s), rather than taking the usual 18 sec. for 8 km the missile would take 14.5 sec to hit its target, leaving the launching plattform a better time window to do other work after destroying its target or taking necessariy maneuvers to avoid incoming threads or entering enemy SHORADS secured space.

However the speed of the launching plattform has of course a much bigger impact on higher speeds like on jets, which have software installed in their Fire Control Systeme, that gives the pilot on their HUD display indicators what their minimum and maximum engagement range is by calculating the own speed the calculated speed of the target and the missile and adjusting the indicator on the HUD display at what speed the launching plattform ca launch against the target.

With the future 5th Generation Attack Helicopters and their new task to be not only air-to-ground but also fully air-to-air capable. Future is rather bright for helicopters and their actual potential is only in the initial phase.