Originally Posted by
Bengo
The basic Lynx airframe development suffered badly from the need to develop a new engine at the same time. The same mistake was not made with Merlin.
The Gem always was a struggle in service but the rest of the airframe was fine once the vibration was understood and all the bits that should have been bigger at the end of development flying had been reinforced. The Lynx was and is an excellent shipborne platform, much better than anything similar and the grid/harpoon/winch set up was a vast improvement on RAST IMO.
With Sea Skua in GW1 the Lynx ability to find and strike was something the SH 60 could not do, though the Seahawk had the better radar.
All in, the RN did well out of the Lynx. Costly? Maybe, but not more so than any military helo.
N
At the time of GW1, the USN was still gyrating around with Penguin due to the offsets from the Norwegian F-16 buy, and the Block I upgraded to handle Penguin. None of the units in the gulf had it.(And none of the ships had modded their torpedo magazines for Penguin, but that work was going on in parallel on the NAVSEA side).
When Burt Palmer and the gang on USS Paul F Foster (IIRC, DD 964?) went out and did that coalition thing with the Lynx in the northern Persian Gulf (his Seahawks with radar, etc, Lynx with Sea Skua, nice teamwork, and nice shooting Team Lynx!) the after action reports had a ripple effect.
It was the needed rock to drop into the duck pond that was the USN air mentality; it got the debate off of top dead center and in time Hellfire came to LAMPS. (Granted, it wasn't the only rock dropped into the pond. We'd been yammering to no avail for a couple of decades regarding LAMPS and forward firing ordnance, but the CV mafia always told us "we'll always have that covered, bombs and missiles on ships and boats, no worries, you get no money."
And then "From the Sea" happened, and "roles and missions fighting in the Pentagon Happened" and the Strike people realized that,
ya know, a few dollars thrown to the helo goons means we can go feet dry and be heroes, and let the rotary wing goons deal with the boats and such.
OK, some literary license in the above ... brought to you by a second class citizen. No, I'm not bitter.
