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
With the size of those aircraft, compromise doesn't reduce it's capability too much. In the case of FLynx, it has the capacity to carry a couple of small Gurkhas with their lunch boxes. Again, this has meant any form of limited movement of men and material has been binned from role and left its primary as 'ISTAR' with a 10 year old EO and a 15 degree look down ability.
Unfortunately in this case you can't have your cake and eat it.
Just a crumb would be nice.
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.
It is most certainly true that AW haven't exactly got their 'A team' on the program and the amount of business the program will attract means it's not given the resources one would like to see. There are some pretty elementary issues that just get swept under the carpet because it seems 'too difficult'.
I totally agree wrt compromise in the design aspects but the compact package that was a brilliant selling point for Lynx 35 years ago has meant that the whole package is a huge compromise now with little room for growth. One would think that modernisation has meant miniaturisation but due to us having very little money to spend, we get all the old, big chunky bits of kit which again means there is virtually no space.
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.
AW shouldn't have pissed Eurocopter off then.
Remind me where Somerset & Dorset Air Ambulance is located now? And why are the not still at Yeovil?
why can't we be happy in the country for UK workers, we seems to have it in for ourselves...
Isn't it true that no job losses would have occurred if FLynx hadn't been signed? You seem to make it sound as if it was a lifeboat chucked at Yeovil and if we hadn't gone for FLynx, thousands of jobs would have been lost. Is it not more the case that Finmeccanica have been looking at pulling all heli production from Yeovil back to Italy and giving Yeovil servicing and transmission work that Agusta currently do anyway?
As for being happy about UK workers. Mmm. Gone are the days of being proud of 'buying British'. I'd be happier if we bought something that was value for money, did the job required and didn't mean we were blackmailed into it.