Senior Member
Registered: 11-07-07
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SASmith,
Overall it will depend on mission. If you are destroying tanks equipped with anti helicopter smart rounds, netcentric battlefield awareness and escort UAVs, you need a heavy antitank platform with a missile and sensor system to overmatch the threat's sensor or weapon engagement zones.
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Ah-64 Apache
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Depends on variant and equipment state. Without Arrowhead and JCM, the current D will not beat the battlefield threats that are out there. Even against 'sime insurgents', you end up fighting the Najaf scenario where the sensor LOS is compromised by tall structures and your weapon can't reach in without over flight.
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Cobra
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The W with NTS is a 15-18 million dollar machine. The Z is probably closer to 25 if not more. Without the four blade rotor you are vulnerable to the tradition mastbump as the the G suffered from over Pleiku 40 years ago.
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Kiowa
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Too much systems weight, not enough payload reserve and the sensor is on the wrong side of the airframe for anything but high intensity (NOE) work.
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Commanche
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Overweight, underpowered, so slow that they had to go to a 'scout for the scout' in the form of AMUST to drive the mission synergies. There were also frankly old sensors onboard, ALERT tried to make a scanning bar sensor into a real time, on the move, targeting system for less 'European' scenarios and simply found it wouldn't work. Overall, especially once the MMR was added to the performance problems, the RAH-66 simply didn't give us enough of what wasn't already there in the Apache to be worthwhile.
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MI-24 Hind
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If there are 50-70 of them and they are dropping troops onto hills overlooking a forced river crossing? Yeah, that'll work. But as a standalone platform this is like the TRex of attack helicopter world. Looks mean but only needs a specific bullet to send it crashing down. Again, there are improvements out there which bring FLIR and new ATGW to the scenario. But it's too big and lumbering to be useful, especially hot and high.
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MI-28 Havoc
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Russian Apache. Monkey see/do. About the best that can be said here is that the Vikhr is such an enormous weapon that, in combination with dual RF/SALF guidance it SHOULD be capable of hypervelocites out to extended ranges, beating all conventional ATGW for first round impacts and shortening the reactive ADV/EXCM window of response. Yet it doesn't. Being only a little faster than early Hellfire.
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MI-35 Hind
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Export Hind. May have better engines? The things to look for are effective suppression (that which doesn't suck 15% or more of your power reserve away) and MAWS cued, effective, countermeasures for transit work. Past that, any helicopter is a bus for weapons systems and nothing Russian is currently all that great.
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PAH-2 Tiger
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Euro Apache with MMS. Composites don't buy you much when you're taking hard-to-repair hits and without the TRIGAT 3LR, it doesn't bring anything to the fight that is particularly noticeable as an improvement.
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WZ-10
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Chinese A-129/Rooivalk hybrid. Same deal: all the high tech in the world doesn't buy as much as simple horsepower and tranni reserves in terms of power:weight and it becomes increasingly a drawback to the hard living of a battlefield environment. Past which, it's all about having LOS on the target plus a cheap multimission guided weapon which generally means either a fast platform able to perform well in the 3-5,000ft AGL arena. Or multiple apertures you are not afraid to lose.
Here's some to consider:
AH-56 Cheyenne
Cancelled for completely unfair reasons, this was a working weapons system that should have been what the A-10 became. 200+ knots without dropping the nose to accelerate (or losing speed in the climb) is not to be ignored in a world where you are fighting over urban areas and have hard threatfloors which just get worse with MANPADS.
A160 Hummingbird
Though it could use a VTDP to improve forward airspeed and cruise efficiencies, by using the rigid rotor of the Cheyenne and taking off the 5,000lbs+ of the crew stations and nose gun you finally get an airframe which has some fractional equivalency to the fixed wing in terms of ceiling and endurance.
They are small enough to be deployed by air in densities similar to the MH-6 and OH-58D and they give you enough assets to truly cover an area with flexible optics and warfighter payloads.
CONCLUSION:
As long as you start to get RBS rollover around 165-170 knots, the helicopter is always going to be configurationally limited.
As long as you insist on pushing the nose below the horizon to service targets, it's always going to be weapons system/threat limited.
As long as you INSIST on a manned configuration, your ability to saturate the ops area or to stay on station after long transits into it will be limited.
Look for drop fire, LOAL, lightweight weapons like GBU-44/VSM, and long endurance (turbine or prop) systems with mixed sensor/weaponization options like SMACM or even Finder/Silent Eyes to replace most LOS horizon sensorization.
Look for a much more radical understanding of the difference between payload bus, altitude for sensor graze and threat refusal as a fleet mix between unmanned and manned versions as well as cost per flying hour.
Finally, look for a system that (like the original SCAT/UTIL configured LHX) can be readily reconfigured to utility/liason use from a single basic cabin structure and particularly one which can energize the civilian market as the LOACH program did with the original MD500/B206 precursors.
And there is where the future of rotary wing 'attack' aviation lies.
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