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Old 31st Oct 2002, 19:20
  #36 (permalink)  
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In the late 90s, ATIL (the people who got the training contract) were fishing around for stuff to plagiarise (copy) to start producing their training documents. One of these was the Lynx instructors guide which in itself was a bastardisation of the original RAF Gazelle instructors guide. Now if they had just asked the RAF to do it for them in the first place........
The Boeing problem was to do with the intellectual property rights to the software and its algorithms that run the hardware. We were allowed to buy the weapon system but not the clever bits inside it - hence when the engines were changed to RR the airframe behaved differently under recoil and the cannon missed!
The higher echelons of the AAC and the big green army were so pleased to get hold of the Apache, they forgot to ask a lot of very pertinent questions about it's capabilities, the non existent simulator and the logistics of supporting it. This was not rocket science - there were many capable people, some of whom had flown it, trying to make the AAC understand what it was taking on and no-one listened to them.
Now the NAO have had their say I don't suppose anything will change and no-one will get the sack for cocking this procurement up so badly.
crab@SAAvn.co.uk is offline