Originally Posted by
Xmit
The Sea King M5's new passive ASW equipment had to be removed because it was next-to-useless against a conventional submarine threat. Although it had the Sea Searcher radome, it was still fitted with the old Mk2 radar system. It's fair to say that the Sea Kings were Mk5s in name only.
Agreed. There were some Mk5s with Sea Searcher fitted, but a few features were not yet finished, such as Track While Scan and radar/sonics integration. There was a TWS switch, but no wiring behind it. It took another 4 or 5 years to finish most of the development, as it was slowed down due to other priorities such as secure comms, EW and AEW. And almost immediately any sonics developments were effectively technology demonstrators for Merlin, the Mk5 sonics kit quietly forgotten. That LAPADS kit, hard copy unit and USH24s were beasts. Lynx and SHAR were the same. All the development/upgrade eggs were in one basket. This meant there were series of regular funding peaks and troughs, and in an effort to smooth them out many programmes were delayed to stagger them. Such as 360 scan for Lynx, which was ready to go in 90 but still wasn't in by 2003. And some of the features evident in the ASaC Mk7, delivered in 2002, were ready by 1988. To say there was a bit of a disconnect in the Naval Air Programme is an understatement, but I always felt it stemmed from the sudden financial windfall in the late 70s that dumped all those eggs on MoD(PE) at the same time, but no other resources. The above work was just a couple of junior engineers and one scientist on a secondment from Farnborough. I thought they did very well.