I certainly could be wrong, I often am.
LW covers a few of my thoughts on procurement and some other things I thought about as well in his post that appeared while I was hammering out this abomination. I too think the solution for the Navy will be off-the-shelf. I also think it will be a single-engine turbine, and it will be bigger than the 206 and less than 7000 pounds, articulated or rigid head, with skids. The cabin will be able to seat 4. It will have at least some glass in it. There's my prediction.
GoodGrief-
Sorry, but you're mistaken there. The reasons are too many to put here, but it's not going to be Robbies across the board, and I'd be happy to lay a few hundred €, £, $ or other legal tender of your choice (or a splendid dinner) on it. The airframes are simply not robust enough and the drive train on the recips are too flimsy. If you know the physical training model (where the airfields are located, maintenance model, fueling locations, and other logistics), there are a dozen other reasons why Robbies won't be chosen. These are not sleepy flight schools with a half-dozen aircraft. These are airfields with 100+ airframes putting out 250-300 helicopter sorties per day using a system of stage fields scattered over a broad area.
Now you could be partly right, but only if a two-tier curriculum as LW mentions is developed for the purpose of teaching basic helicopter airwork, perhaps by civilian instructors. I suppose that's possible, but I couldn't say how likely that might be. My guess would be not likely, but that's only a guess.
Sans-
I am personally somewhat in agreement and sympathetic with you here, but the facts don't really care whether you and I agree. Steam is very nearly dead in Naval Air, and that is a major consideration, rightly or wrongly. The 53D is done, the 46 is done, all the Marine Corps machines are now partly or mostly glass. The Navy is all glass in the 60 community, mostly glass in the 53E. All new fleet procurements are glass. Whatever new trainer goes to the Navy (and probably the Army) will have some form of glass in it.
When I was fresh out of the training command as a student, I likely would have been more in agreement with each of you as to what was needed, because that was what I knew. When I had spent some time there many years later, I recognized that fleet needs had changed and were not being met (though nothing actually changed substantially in fact during my time there).
I can't speak in an informed fashion to Army needs, but my guess is that the Army is thinking somewhat along similar lines, but also probably has a surplus of UH-72s they can't quite figure out what to do with and they're coming up with justification for a twin because that's what they have on hand and they know very well how long the procurement process takes. What they may do with their TH-67s is a good question, as they are somewhat younger than the Navy's TH-57s.
I quite deliberately didn't say what machine I thought was best (or if I even have an opinion), but I do know what's being looked at, and it's not the R-44, and I seriously doubt they'll spin up the 206 production line again with all the powertrain and other grounding issues the TH-57 has been having.
As to the T-6, I have a passing familiarity with the T-6 and know why it was chosen and the compromises that were made during the process by the two very different primary customers in the interest of a common airframe. I know who wanted a jet, and who wanted a turboprop and why. Lots of heated arguments during that process by intractable parties. Nobody got all they wanted.
The TH-57 is the ONLY current primary or advanced training aircraft in Naval Air that is not glass and doesn't include a FMS, to include the T-6. Just because the T-6 has a spinner on the nose doesn't mean it's not a big technological leap from the T-34. It is. The TH-57 is also the only turboprop or turboshaft in the Navy training mix that is not PT-6 powered.
Rotary is the only pipeline where the students make a retrograde technological step when they move to advanced training.
In the U.S., fast-mover training prior to award of wings involves two distinct aircraft (three, actually). Helicopter training in the Navy system involves two distinct airframes, only one of which is a rotorcraft. That rotorcraft is currently configured in two different ways. One is a basic VFR configuration, the other is a non-conforming and uncertifiable IFR configuration that is running out of spares.
A significant portion (about 7%) of the curriculum is tied up in transitional flights between helicopter airframes, and a significant portion of the FRS for fleet helicopters is tied up in familiarization with FMS and glass because a very large portion of the advanced rotary curriculum has to be retaught in the fleet. The rotary curriculum also involves a fair bit of time in the cruise transitioning to a number of stage fields in a helicopter that can carry two pax at best.
Anyway, all that transition & familiarization stuff has to be done somewhere, in something. So you can pay for that with a ground trainer, sims, and a moderately expensive aircraft at the training command or you can do that at the fleet level with a larger pilot pool making use of the order-of-magnitude more expensive hardware. But you do have to pay for it at some point. It's just a question of when and what it will cost.
Not all these issues are resolved, so far as I am aware, and my finger is definitely not right on the pulse, but that's how I see it shaping up. Again, I could be totally wrong. I guess in a few years we'll see if any of us are right.
But at the end, if you don't know what the end customer (Naval or Army Air) wants, you can't back track to determine the appropriate tool to deliver that end product in the form of an aviator.