It is a truth universally acknowledged that the workhorse of modern warfare is the helicopter and the workiest of all the horses is the Chinook. The Chinook is a great aircraft. Because of it’s twin contra-rotating rotors it doesn’t need a tail rotor and tail rotors use a lot of energy.
The RAF, out of a fleet of forty, in various states of dilapitude or lacking aircrew (why are they lacking aircrew? Since when did being a pilot cease to be an attractive career option - flying something - anything is a hellishly valuable skill and not something you can easily learn off your own hook without going to very considerable expense) can field 8-10 in Afghanistan. And then there is the saga of the C3As
In addition there are eight Chinooks which have never flown and are being taken apart by engineers at Boscombe Down, Dorset. These are the infamous Mark 3As which were bought for £259 million for special forces and delivered to the RAF in 2001, but had to be parked for seven years in an air-condioned hangar because the MoD had failed to ask Boeing for rights to the avionics software. Without it, the helicopters were mere hulks that could not be flown.
They are now being “reverted” to Chinook Mark 3Rs for regular troops in Afghanistan. Robert Key, the Conservative MP for Salisbury, whose constituency includes Boscombe Down, revealed that each Chinook was having “24,000 bits of wire” removed as part of the modification.
This is because the Chinook Mark 3As, which were designed for the digital age, with digitised wiring and an advanced cockpit for covert operational flying, are being turned into ordinary utility helicopters — with analog wiring.
By almost any standard that is a gold-plated peach of an epic cock-up. We are actually paying more money, much more money to basically fuck the ‘copters-up. It’s like buying the latest Merc, parking it in storage for eight years and then paying somebody to bash it into the shape of a 1970s Vauxhall Viva. Does any fucker at the MoD have the slightest idea what is going on or indeed even have the capacity to find their arse in a well-lit room using both hands and GPS?
Just go read the whole sorry tale. I am not surprised General Sir Richard Dannatt is in a strop over the debacle and utterly pissed-off with the RAF (why BTW do we split our tactical ‘copters between the RAF and the Army?) because I’m inchoate with fury.
Around the time of the Falklands, my dad was working for the MOD in the um, footwear part of the operation, and was a major part of the design of the new army boot. So anyway, there were stories in the press about how this new boot wasn’t up to the job and was failing our boys. But the fact was, they were still using the old boot, because the new one had been so delayed it hadn’t been issued. So he went to his boss and said they should tell the press this wasn’t the fault of the new boot, it was the crappy old boot, and his boss said, no way would they do that, because then they’d be admitting that the new boot was so far behind schedule.
What the Times doesn’t mention: the Dutch bought the same Chinook, but with the all-digital controls/cockpit etc. They worked from the get-go.
The UK MoD tried to save money by building it with part- analogue controls, part digital. And the UK-built merger of the two elements never worked properly.
I did wonder what had happened to them. Now we know.
Reference boots: the US Army in 1990 still had the Vietnam-era boot as standard. It was designed to be water-proof for the damp jungles, and had metal plates in the sole against spikes in the ground (a Viet Cong home-made trap). Not a good boot for hot dry conditions.
Schwarzkopf recognised that a different design was needed, and a canvas/plastic/leather combination was worked out. A quarter-million pairs were ordered.
They were delivered: in May 1991, a month after the war ended.
All the scenarios and planning - such as positioning tanks in bases in the Indian Ocean - hadn’t taken into account the basic fact of infantry war: the feet.
So what’s new? Schlieffen made the same error in planning 1914. The reservists couldn’t march as fast as he planned, due to blisters on untrained feet.
Thanks for explaining that, I always thought that they didn’t actually ask for the correct specs.
“You want them to fly at night ?, well you never mentioned it”
MOD “Well we sort of assumed that was standard”
“No, you went for the basic version to save money, all the rest are ‘extras’ it’s like buying a basic Escort and wondering why it’s only got a tape deck and not a CD player”
MOD ” Bugger”
Add on the Nimrod debacle ( with the useless Marconi radar that cost billions) when we eventually still had to buy a few AWACS off the shelf, but are still going ahead with the program for the MRA4 ( contract 1996, due to enter service 2003 , 2009 no fucking sign of it)
Billions and billions of public money and jobs for the boys, trebles all round.
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ED is spot on. We tried to do a cut and shut on the Chinooks and it was like basically one of Baldrick’s cunning plans.
And he’s right on boots too. A ritual which certain officers saw as almost religious was checking their men’s feet during WWI.
Napolean was wrong. An army marches on it’s feet.
I own a pair of steel-toecaped, kevlar soled Swat trainers that cost about 70 quid. Why not give the lads and lasses a boot allowance and be done with it.
We give MPs an allowance for moat dredging. Which I guess was conceivably a suitable military expense in 1409.