Improvement... surely?
How can crash worthy seats be in any way a BAD thing?
All crash worthy seats to the best of my knowledge preclude putting anything under them, allowing them to stroke (true in UH60, Merlin , NH90 etc). if we expect our aircraft to protect our troops in the event of a crash (which legacy aircraft such as CH47, Sea King, Puma and current Lynx DONT) there are some compromises that have to be made and a reduction is stowage space is one of them
Unfortunately in this case you can't have your cake and eat it.
And please dont make the assumption that contractors employ idiots, I am sure there are very knowledgeable people within WHL (ever heard of test pilots or the airframe design team for the last 35 years) who may be in posession of more issues regarding factors influencing the design than others outside industry. Every design is a compromise after all and you can't please all the people all the time.
Answers to the stacker
Yes, at one time (long ago in a galaxy far far away) there was an agreement to build UH60s in the UK, however that vanished after GW1, without the MoD placing any orders and with a change in the political landscape that made is acceptable for the US to supply kit directly to previously 'unacceptable' customers.
The AW139 is of course a AW product and currently there is no line in the UK, I conceed that it may have been necessary to initiate a line if an order had been placed but given the number of other 139 lines around the world I think it unlikely that AW management would pay for another line at one of their existing sites (hardly counts as an offset does it)
The EC725 has very little in common with a Puma, and in this case I am sure that Eurocopter would never give the UK a product line for those. In the past WHL (as it was) and Aerospatiale were partners (Lynx, Puma , Gazelle ), thats not true now.
why can't we be happy in the country for UK workers, we seems to have it in for ourselves...
DM