Lots of questions/clarifications:
Graviman - Military OEI criteria - Who cares? When you are going into battle, the standard is first operational capability (number of enemy dead, amount of territory gained) then your attrition, then your cost. Far different game than a civil equation of excellence! Remember, an Army General carefully calculates how many of his men a hill is worth. "Saving Private Ryan" was only slightly fictional...thus ballistic tolerance and survival after shootdown are valued more highly than the more improbably engine failure performance.
diethelm, a military or civil government can "mint" their own certification, and they are not bound by FAA/JAR rules in any way. There is not a way for the FAA to govern military certification or operations except when the military agrees to do so. A spitfire never saw a CAA inspector, and who cares, anyway? Winning a battle means calculations that care not a whit for what a civil standard means. In other words, a Kamakazi fighter probably is not Catagory A, and its reserve fuel included no need for an alternate!
wg13_dummy, I don't agree that mil machine are cheaper, at all. They are usually much more per pound than a similar civil helo. They spend their coin on different aspects, like a big torpedo to drop, or a turret that slews quickly and shoots fast. These attributes are expensive and important, and do not at all add to safety.
bayou06, I said nothing about a 407's civil certification, which is IMHO very nice. I said it meets no modern criteria as a military scout except that it is cheap. Anyone who goes into battle in an Apache or Black Hawk, (or would have in a Comanche) is in much better stead to come home that in a 407, which was bought by the Rumsfeld bunch that trades "now, cheap and poor" for "future, more expensive and excellent" with abandon. If you shoot the same bullet at a Black Hawk and a 145, you will get far far different damage, and that is the problem. The Army boards who set up the standards to which the H-60 and 64 were designed did so by tracking every bullet path of every hit in 3000 Hueys from Vietnam, and these standards made the survivability of these types fantastic. These rules were also applied to the Comanche, and the other helos bought by AVSCOM (the engineers hired by the Army to develop new helos). The "new" DoD of this modern era abandoned the rules, bypassed AVSCOM and just bought civil stuff off the shelf, and a generation of soldiers will pay.
flyby_heli, The firehawks are just Army Black Hawks with restricted tickets, which means that they can only fly the same missions as the Army flies, and that they cannot be used for hire with pax - everybody on board must be crew in some form or another (firefighters are crew to the mission at hand).
rotorfloat, I have no idea how my words sparked your confusion, except my ineptness at explaining. I am saying that the latest round of US Army purchases meets no ballistic or crashworthy criteria, and thus are a step backwards, and somehow you drew the opposite conclusion. Oh well. Furthermore, there is no rule that the H-60 had to meet about OEI performance, but it of course was tested to show its capability. This was a design fallout, not a hard requirement, if you understand the difference. Thus it is a screamer, but not by design and with little published data to back that up.
perfrej, There are two cases, and I think you mix them up a bit:
1) The machine is ex-military and no civil counterpart exists, like a Black Hawk or an Mi-24. It can be "certified" to ebter civil service as restricted, see above for that definition. No pax for hire, ever.
2) The machine has a civil design that has been fully certified, but the serial number machine you want to induct into civil commercial service is ex-military (because the military service that used it has low standards and bought it to begin with). In this case you must show that the machine you have is exactly (part by part) like its civil sister ships and that the exact machine you have has been maintained to the civil flight and maintenance manuals (part numbers, retirement intervals, and flight manual operating limits). Not a small task.
Last edited by NickLappos; 17th March 2007 at 09:09.