Now that its been established that the V-22 is just as combat capable as ALL other helicopters, it looks like it's sorely need NOW. It will be interesting to see how much
Bang for the Buck it brings to the Afghanistan War as I'd bet someone is saying somewhere that the incidents below
might have been avoided had the V-22 been there to
Go-Faster & Farther:
Copter Crashes Reveal Achilles’ Heel of Afghan War
Afghanistan is a country the size of Texas, with only a handful of major roads. So when the U.S. military wants to haul gear, supply isolated outposts, reposition forces, or evacuate wounded troops, the first, best and sometimes only option is to do so by helicopter.
Which means that the demand for helos at most U.S. bases far outstrips the supply. And the helicopters that do fly operate under unforgiving and often dangerous conditions, as we saw in
Monday’s twin copter calamities, which killed 14 Americans. In short, helicopters are the irreplaceable connective tissue of the Afghanistan war effort — and its potential Achilles’ heel. “It’s our strategic weak point,” a defense official told Danger Room.
In the 1980s, the U.S. famously supplied Afghan militants with Stinger missiles that began to threaten the Soviets’ helo fleet at risk. It drove up the cost of operating in Afghanistan, and contributed to the Red Army’s eventual defeat.
For years, commanders have
complained that helicopters were the one thing they couldn’t get enough of, and coalition forces in Afghanistan have often had to rely on outsourcing to fill in the gaps. “
We definitely don’t have enough helicopters,” British Foreign Office Minister Lord Maloch Brown recently said, before issuing a quick “clarification.”
NATO decided to
lease civilian helicopters in late 2007. In some cases, that has meant relying on contracted Soviet-bloc helicopters that might have less-than-stellar maintenance records. Back in July,
16 civilians working under contract to Western forces were killed when their Russian-made helicopter plunged to the ground just after takeoff at Kandahar airfield. That incident came just days after a Moldovan-owned Mi-26 helicopter was
downed in Helmand Province; six Ukrainian contractors were killed.
Even if more military helicopters are sent to Afghanistan, there’s a much bigger issue: Operating rotary aircraft in Afghanistan can be extremely difficult.
Earlier this year,
Popular Mechanics reporter Joe Pappalardo spent some time with the wrench-turners who keep the helicopters flying in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan,” he concluded, “
is hell on helicopters.” Here’s a list of just a few of the things he noted that can go wrong: Temperature extremes that destroy seals and gaskets; “high/hot” flying conditions that reduce engine performance; dust and sand that ruin rotor blades and clog up hydraulics. And, of course, there’s the enemy. (Soviet helicopter operations were also vulnerable, albeit for a different reason: The delivery of the Stinger missile, courtesy of the United States.)
Those tough conditions are not unique to Afghanistan: In the run-up to the Iraq war, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, then-commander of the 101st Airborne Division, ordered thousands of cans of spray paint to help slow the shredding of rotor blades. But Iraq now has a well-established network of bases with paved airstrips, sparing helicopters from having to do a lot of extreme dust landings. In Afghanistan, that’s not the case.
A former Army Apache pilot told Danger Room that these austere flying conditions might have been a factor in the collision of two coalition helicopters earlier today.
“These guys are operating from fairly austere forward bases — even the larger ones, and generally under ‘Visual Flying Conditions’ and Visual Flying Rules (VFR),” the aviator said. “In the tactical environment, if weather goes bad quickly, the pilots have to adjust to an IFR [Instrument Flying Rules] flight plan and landing approach. This usually means that tactical operations cease; Individual aircraft on planned instrument flights from point to point will continue, but there are no instrument formation flights.”
In such cases, pilots flying in formation have rules to separate from each other when they inadvertently go into IFR: The lead aircraft might go straight and climb to a certain altitude, and the second might turn right 15 degrees and fly to a higher altitude. But if there are multiple formations in the air, they might not be able to de-conflict their flight paths when they scatter. “I don’t know what the ATC [air traffic control] capability is there, but if several aircraft went inadvertent IFR at the same time or close to the same time, it would take a bit to sort them out, assign transponder codes, and prioritize them for a controlled (radar) approaches in,” the aviator said.
Add to that a number of other factors — low-light conditions, flying under night-vision goggles, sudden dust swirls, enemy ground fire — and you’ve put one of the centerpieces of this war at even greater risk.
– Nathan Hodge and Noah Shachtman