Stinger, I am not sure if the Army had fitted their trainer 206's with provisinos for an NVG friendly cockpit. I do know that some of the OH-58 birds were so fitted, but that was field units, not trainers.
Navy was undertaking a new cockpit lighting scheme for TH-57 beginning a bit over 10 years ago, with the idea of fitting some of the TH-57's with AN/AVS 9 nvgs to put a few of the nvg flights into the helo syllabus. Not sure how that finally worked out, but I had not heard great news on that front. (Will take a peek and see what I can figure out).
Why the Lakota becomes attractive just because of NVG friendly set up is a bit of a mystery to me. I'd need to get a look at how the final version of Ruckers first to last training pipeline is built to get a handle on that. Again, been a few years since I had my hands on such things, so I'm a bit out to lunch on details.
EDIT: looks like the Navy NVG syllabus has been alive and well as far back as 2011, maybe before, with both sims and flights included. Progress!
