Sometimes you just reach into your toolbox and pull out your favorite hammer when you need to drive a nail.
One passage in the linked article stood out to me.....as I bleed Chinook having flown them in 1968....with one of them currently in the US Army Museum at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Who would have guessed the old girls would still be strutting their stuff a century later?
There is no plan at the moment to develop a heavy lift FVL platform to replace the Army’s Chinooks. Conventional forces and SOCOM will be flying the tandem-rotor helicopters into the 2060s and are preparing a suite of structural and performance upgrades to keep them relevant for another 40 years. SOCOM is ahead of the Army in upgrading its MH-47G Chinooks to Block II configuration, with redesigned fuel tanks, stiffer airframe, and improved drivetrain. That work will carry SOCOM out to 2029, at which point plans are to introduce Block “X” upgrades, according to Downer.