There was a political assumption/requirement that it had to be Westland - and I suspect that meant Lynx, exactly because of the need for a common platform for BRH/BLUH/SCMR/FRC Find etc.
I know that the AAC all had hard-ons for the Blackhawk, but if we ever got H-60s (or NH90s, or Super-Duper Puma/Cougars) you know as well as I do that they'd go to the crabs.
There may have been a window of opportunity for the Corps to get a 139-sized machine, but no bigger than that.
But in the event the AAC was forced to take a Lynx (and the AW139/149 would have been better?)
Should it have been a T800 powered aircraft with metal blades? How easy would it have been to reduce the disc loading? Would a longer boom/longer fuselage, bigger main rotor really have been so very disastrous? Why?
Would you want an optimised wheeled gear, or do you really drool for skids?
What could be done to sort out this disc-loading related NR problem?
Go easy on me, I'm a rusty fixed wing PPL, so the intricacies of RW handling are a black art.....
But I am a generally friendly, pro-Defence journo who is struggling to understand this.