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
I did my BEng in aeronautics at Southampton, where we were taught helicopter design (he called it "powered lift") by Simon Newman, who had worked on much of the development of the Lynx at WHL before he became an academic. You could rely on absolutely every design teaching point being illustrated with a Lynx example.
The previous course has presented him with a specially designed certificate for his "unerring over-use of the Lynx helicopter in teaching". He had it on his office wall for years, so I think was quite proud of the achievement! I've still got all the notes somewhere, but most of it I think is also in his book "Foundations of Helicopter Flight". He was a great chap to learn from.
G