Puma Upgrade Delay
 

Defense News: RAF Delays Timetable To Field Upgrade Puma Helo

LONDON — Royal Air Force plans to field an upgraded version of the Eurocopter Puma helicopter have been delayed until at least the middle of next year, according to Britain’s defense procurement and support minister.

The Ministry of Defence said that the crash of a civilian version of the Puma in France in July, which killed key Eurocopter flight test crew, was partly to blame for the delay.

“There have been some delays to aspects of the project and work is being undertaken to understand whether this will impact on fielding plans” Procurement Minister Philip Dunne admitted in a parliamentary written response today. Dunne failed to specify the cause of the problem.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman later said that one of the reasons for the delay was the crash in the French Alps, which killed key Eurocopter test pilots. “A review into the causes of the delay has not yet been complete, however, the Eurocopter air crash [in July] was a factor, as are other unexpected delays — mainly, work we had not expected has had to be done,” said the spokesman. Eurocopter declined to comment.

Signed in 2009, the £339 million pound ($538.2 million) program to significantly update 24 Puma Mk 1 tactical transports operated by the British has seen the helicopter emerge with new engines, flight controls and other upgrades. At one time, the life-extension program of the tactical transport helicopter was a candidate for the axe as part of the budget-cutting strategic defense review in 2010.

The first production standard aircraft undertook its maiden flight in September 2012 and 21 of the 24 helicopter’s in the program have either been delivered or are in the update program being undertaken at a Eurocopter factory in Romania.

Dunne said the MoD “currently expects to field the initial aircraft for training by mid-2013 and incrementally expand the capacity and capability of the Puma Mk2 force over the subsequent two years.” When the deal was signed in 2009, it was expected the Puma Mk2 would enter service this year and reach full operational capability in 2014. The procurement minister said the upgrade is still forecast to be delivered within budget.

British rotorcraft plans envisage tactical helicopter lift being provided by Boeing Chinooks and Mk2 Puma’s, while with the AgustaWestland Merlin machines, which are also operated in that role, will be being used moved over to provide amphibious lift for the Royal Navy’s Commando forces, as its Sea King capability is finally pensioned off.

Perhaps the minister has been misinformed, or merely and more probably failed to grasp his brief?

The quotes attributed to the Minister are taken from a written answer to a Parliamentary Question. The answer contains nothing that is incorrect (as far as I can see) but at the same time gives no more detail than is strictly necessary to answer the question - which is par for the course for these things.

Is the work still expected to go to Romania ?

Puma upgrade delay
 

Is that a delay from the 1980s when the first accident reports stated that engine anticipators should be fitted urgently.....?

Over 650 Pumas managed to survive without anticipators.

How Many?
 

Just a thought but if we asked nicely how many nice big chunky Russian Helicopters could the MOD buy for £335 million?

You know the ones that work in Afghanistan...

Still I am sure the Romanians will do a great job...

A couple of dozen.... Then you would have to shell out another £350 million in five years time.

In 1979 I gained access to a Boscombe Down TP's report that recommended that the aircraft shouldn't be accepted into service without engine anticipators fitted; it was dated quite some years before 1979 (first HC1s came into service in 1971).

We managed to cope all right, but they obviously can't get the staff of the same calibre these days. :E

Having said that, the most responsive Puma I ever flew was one in NI that was red-lined for lack of engine matching at low power settings (they were set up manually with a screwdriver after flight testing, sometimes took ages). It had a 10 or 11% Ng split; IIRC the max book figure was 3 or 4%.

Whatever you did to the Nr, the high engine wouldn't back off to flight idle and the rotor response was far better. It felt like a totally different aircraft!

As an aside, the old Wessex lags said that the Puma would never last in RAF service because the airframe was built too lightly. 41 years in service as a Mk1 has proved them totally wrong!

Everything about the Puma when it was bought was compared to the Wessex. Everything that was not Wessexy was slagged off. No anticipators, that were impossible to fit, Forward visibilty, not low enough, instrument lighting, the wrong colour. Some were reasonable like stability on the ground but even the engineers tried to service it like a Wessex.
The ultimate was when Den Holland and Phil Bleasedale had a doghouse come off and disable the tail rotor at 200 ft. They had to shut down both and carry out an engine off landing and if it wasn't for a wheel snagging a rabbit burrow they would have got away with it. They were dragged over the coals for not finding 'a power and control combination to enable flight to be continued'. A phrase lifted straight out of the Wessex checklist.

As Shy Torque says, 41 years later.

£14 mill a pop for a little over 10 years return of service. Value for money..... I feel proud as a taxpayer that my money is yet again being so well spent.

Puma v Mi 17 v Blackhawks
 

On 28 October 2008 the Royal Thai Army announced a deal to buy 6 Mi-17s to meet its requirement for a medium-lift helicopter. This is the first time the Thai military has acquired Russian aircraft instead of American.[6] Flight International quotes the Thai army’s rationale: "We are buying three Mi-17 helicopters for the price of one Black Hawk. The Mi-17 can also carry more than 30 troops, while the Black Hawk could carry only 13 soldiers. These were the key factors behind the decision."[7]

Actually I think £339 million would buy more capability for hot/high ops than a Puma Upgrade.

Lastly must we always go down this route after decades of service. Would the RAF have considered a Spitfire upgrade 40 years after its first flight?

The Spitfire(s) remained in front line service for less than two decades and it wasn't really the same aircraft by the time the Mk 24(!) came along.

I reckon the Pumas have given the RAF mighty fine service, despite the design shortcomings. There can't be many other aircraft of any type that have retained the original Mk1 status after forty one years.

But at the end of the day, it's all down to money, as always.

41 years at 30kts faster- that's a few miles ahead of the Wazzex!:ok:

CG

Hopefully we won't be doing any of those for a while past 2014.

Bigpants,

May I suggest that, in part, the answer to your question is the way the armed forces of the UK procure capital equipment and then support it in service.

If 'the system' took a 'through life' view of the procurement and ongoing support, plus the likely requirements for upgrades and set down a plausible replacement strategy - should that requirement have been identified, the outcome for many of our weapons systems would be very different.

The major impediment to realistic costings is the annualisation arrangements and the grubbing around which goes on just to keep a weapon system viable against all the other claims for funding. The method by which future costs are measured against inflation leaves something to be desired and this without political interference in the process (would we have bought SA80 if it wasn't seen as important to keep a factory open?).

Old Duffer

fareastdriver
 

You sure it wasn't Neil Mitchel?

Could be but Den sticks in the mind. All junior pilots looked the same in those days.

It does sound like Neil's accident, which he described it to me in person, it occurred in NI and he had troops on board at the time. He was criticised for not flying it back to Aldergrove! As we all know now, the only speed/power combination for a Puma with no tail rotor is about 70kts and engines off!

This is going back a few years -

If I recall, wasn't Neil criticised (in his incident) by the BOI for not shutting the engines down (exactly) iaw FRCs whilst executing a EOL?

Picky, picky BOIs? :}

S4G

WG13,
If you are concerned how your taxes are spent, perhaps you should question why we pay welfare benefits to foreigner's and still continue the Wildcat Programme.

Because Wildcat is with the FLC already and will have reached IOC before Puma 2 will even have got out of Romania.....plus it'll be in service for 40 years.

And I do also agree that Wildcat isnt the best way of spending tax payers money either. :ok:

IIRC and I'm not doing very well when I cannot get the pilot's name right, one of the members of the BofI was a very respected member of the Support Helicopter force. I was a surprise to me when the verdict started to filter through and it apparantly filtered through to the AOC. He took further advice and threw the conclusions back at them and told them to re-write it. At the same time the FRCs were amended.

Bigpants. It will all end in tears. The Third World is littered with derelict Russian equipment. There is nothing intrinsically wrong wiith them, there just aren't any spares. They are either not available or the lead time is too great.
I worked for a long time in China and in the late nineties the Chinese civil aviation was expanding explosively. They were buying everything in sight, even BAC111s. I flew a couple of times in the Tu 154M. One of the things that stood out when you walked in was that several of the overhead locker doors were missing. My Chinese engineers later explained that they were irreplacable even though the aircraft had only just gone out of production. In Tanjian in north eastern China I looked out of the window on the approach and there was a clutch of surplus Aeoflot 154s on a pan. They had been bought by the regional Chinese airline to be used as Xmas trees.
Apart from a few licence built AS Dauphines the civil helicopter industry in China is exclusively Western equipment and also since the turn of the century so are their fixed wing brothers.
They do produce helicopters that have a unique capability. To see a MI 26 underslinging a full sized tracked excavator into the hills during the Chinese Earthquake plus another one with a bulldozer in the back is something you do not see very often. However you cannot get away from the fact that they have low TBOs and poor spares support plus any political ramifications.

Fareastdriver, from what I know of the accident I was told about, that very respected member of the SH force probably had the initials DL.

Wg13 - several Puma 2s are already well clear of Romania :ok:

This has got Nimrod written all over it...

I just hope I'm wrong

Not quite the same. Nimrods were hand built and they, as they found out trying to put the big hulls on, were all different lengths. The Pumas, albiet built in Britain, were made in French jigs. The Makila conversion has already been done to Portugese Pumas and the rest is modernising the electrics. It's a shame they couldn't have flashed out on the single wheel undercarriage but you can't have everything. It may be over forty years old but it's a utility helicopter. The job that utility helicopters do has not changed much over that time and it goes as fast as any and carries as much as any.
I would not have believed that when I sat behind a Puma windscreen for the first time in 1971 that I would sit behind an identical windscreen, blue/amber pips and all, on my last professional command thirty eight years later.

Sure - but I meant more the delays, Govt still uber-short of cash, thinking the unthinkable etc, rather than the act of modernising an old airframe.

What! and make a load of Rumanian aircraft workers redundant. Brussels would never let it happen.

Since when was the Cougar AS532 a civilian version? :ugh:

Puma tail rotor failure
 

Yes it was Neil, with Phil Bleasdale and Ron Graham. No troops though. 37secs from bang to crash and thank goodness Den Holland, watching the event as numbeer 2 in the pair, said in a Mayday relay that the tail rotor had gone; because there were some empty thinks bubbles in the cockpit at the time, and only 300ft to play with.

I was just about to say that Den was #2 but Cadenas beat me to it. However, his description of watching it all happening was 'interesting' to say the least. I always thought they had done an outstanding job actually getting it on the ground in more or less one piece, and as for DL's comment of the 'finding the power/speed combination' with only 2-300ft to play with................!

I've got the photos of the after crash scene somewhere in someones loft. Tha aircraft turned on its side and apparently Ron Graham came out of the bottom cabin door and got a bollocking for not using the upper door!!:hmm:

He also got a bollocking for not assuming his correct crash position.
He spread himself flat on the floor and hung onto the seats - seemed to work fine!

If they can do all this retrospective stuff, maybe Neil could now be awarded the AFC he undoubtedly deserved?!
A nicer, more modest and more brilliant pilot it would be difficult to meet.

lsh
:E

Ah so it was Ron that started the non approved crash position which most Crewmen have used, in the various prangs that have occurred over the years.

It may not be official but if it works.........:ok:

Apart from you........ obviously:)

But the 'Crash Position' or rather Crash Seat will be resolved with the upgrade surely.....................:E

Surprised no one picked this up, bit of a milestone:
http://www.shephardmedia.com/news/rotorhub/puma-hc1-completes-last-sortie-raf-benson/

So no aircraft available for either squadron?

Now last time that happened…

Can anyone say for certain if the HC2 airframes will retain their original military registration numbers when they go back into service?