With the Bell 206 out of production, there are a lot of good single on the market for less than $1000/hr.....Bell 407Gx, AW119Kx, AS-350, EC-120, Bell SLS ..... just to name a few. Starting to sound like the Army needs a home for the Lakota and is putting a square peg into a round hole just to make their aviation re-alignment plan work out; at the taxpayers expense.
The TH-57/67s are tired and somewhat irrelevant to DoD fleet helicopters anymore. For example; All naval aviators start out in T-6B which is a glass environment, same as 95% of DoD helicopters and tilt-rotors, and then go backwards to analog just to get through the helicopter syllabus. Not to mention the characteristics of a two-bladed rotor system, which are no longer in DoD service either, are significantly different than a multi-bladed rotor system. Both are negative learning points. So the current aircraft are an anachronism going forward.
So the Army is going to do full contact autos, and let guys with 0 hrs learn to hover in a complex helicopter that cost 5x more per/hr to fly?
