Originally Posted by
60FltMech
...not sure why that would be, other than the UH-60A May have more significant costs associated with airframe condition due to age?...
...At any rate, would be very interesting to know exactly how the cost is actually computed. Of course, there may be a significant amount of smoke and or mirrors involved in these calculations, as anyone dealing with any government entity for any amount of time would know….
FltMech
Thanks for your insights.
A summary of Black Hawk variants is provided by Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_UH-60_Black_Hawk
If I interpret it correctly, MH-60L is based on UH-60L which in turn seem to be upgraded UH-60A's with T700-GE-701C originally fitted (to the L's) in place of T700-GE-700 (for A's). Yet MH-60L, of which only 37 produced and with all its 'extras', is one of the pair with the
lowest listed O&M rate of all the variants. So if they are built from refurbished UH-60A's, perhaps cost of refurbishment of the older airframes and renewal of engines was absorbed under a different (acquisition) budget and so became 'invisible'?
Yes, I always wonder about 'smoke and mirrors' or simply inconsistent cost accounting (such as 'acquisition costs' paid twice for one airframe) corrupting what might otherwise be a nice dataset.