Would it have been any good?
Avoid imitations
Join Date: Nov 2000
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The "intensive" downwash argument helped steer the RAF away from Puma/Super Puma SAR, many years ago.
Yet we found during wet drills that we could trap the liferaft and then bring the Puma down to a wheels on water height to allow "survivors" to climb directly into the cabin.
Obviously, we kept it quiet, to make sure the yellowjob winch-ops didn't get put up for redundancy...
Yet we found during wet drills that we could trap the liferaft and then bring the Puma down to a wheels on water height to allow "survivors" to climb directly into the cabin.
Obviously, we kept it quiet, to make sure the yellowjob winch-ops didn't get put up for redundancy...
The move from the Wessex to Sea King did involve increasing hover heights to mitigate the downwash but the Merlin has a very concentrated downwash due to disc loading and blade design that takes it into another league entirely.
Three or a dozen....surely the "need" is secondary to capacity because when you need the capacity it is surely a life or death situation is it not?
I also think the Danes and particularly the Canadians might not be that satisfied with it on reliability and availability grounds
Gievn that our procurement always runs on rails, maybe the Merlin is a likely candidate after all...
Torque,
Fair point about the Canadians. It's the same issue that hamstrung the Brit Merlin which, with adequate spares support, is a very reliable cab given it's complexity. At one point a few years back it wasn't possible to put a serviceable Mk 3 on the line because there were no spare landing lamp bulbs! Incidents like this, to the uninformed, meant the aircraft was categorically 'unreliable'.
llamaman
Fair point about the Canadians. It's the same issue that hamstrung the Brit Merlin which, with adequate spares support, is a very reliable cab given it's complexity. At one point a few years back it wasn't possible to put a serviceable Mk 3 on the line because there were no spare landing lamp bulbs! Incidents like this, to the uninformed, meant the aircraft was categorically 'unreliable'.
llamaman
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Well pedantically the uninformed would be correct..
Like so much modem military kit the Merlin is a "system" - and its the "system" that' has broken down.
You can't tell the public that on one hand the Merlin is a complete packaged system, but then claim the Merlin is only an airframe when the system goes wrong..
Time for consistency in nomenclature - or even a completely new nomenclature to differentiate between "Merlin the system" and "Merlin the aircraft"
Like so much modem military kit the Merlin is a "system" - and its the "system" that' has broken down.
You can't tell the public that on one hand the Merlin is a complete packaged system, but then claim the Merlin is only an airframe when the system goes wrong..
Time for consistency in nomenclature - or even a completely new nomenclature to differentiate between "Merlin the system" and "Merlin the aircraft"
