Nightmare515

No we aren't currently using any laser guided rockets and I haven't heard of any plans for them any time soon. I actually just learned about laser guided rockets by reading this forum. The article i read about them said that the tested them from an Apache last month but I don't know of any units that are currently fielding them yet. I would personally love to see the system implemented. Unguided rockets can be a bit tricky to accurately fire.

Man that thing is sexy!

Now THAT is awesome! I have the utmost respect for you Navy flyboys who do what you do on those carriers. I remember reading that during Vietnam the pilots heart rate was actually faster when coming in for landing on the carrier than when engaging in combat with the North Vietnamese. That must be saying something in regards to just how difficult that is and how much skill and concentration is required to perform such a feat. And you guys do it day in and day out. Amazing. Awesome video, thanks for sharing with us!

No I haven't heard anything about that. The E model has the same setup as the D model pretty much so they might do it for the Block IV if they ever make one.

Ah yes, so now that we have all established what the sexiest cockpit is we can move on to the ugliest ones ;)

Ain't it purty ;)

It would be decades before the JMR medium replaces the Apache if it even does so at all. The E model Apaches are just coming out to extend the life of the aircraft and give it more of a multirole purpose as far as scouting and attack. Not to be bias but the Apache itself is almost a perfect aircraft for what its designed to do. The only real draw back is what plagues all helicopters and thats the limited fuel quantity. If engineers can ever figure out how to make helicopters more fuel efficient then I honestly believe the Apache would the last attack helicopter we'd ever need. Unless of course we want to try the stealth approach again. Due to the limited range of helicopters we have to limit our time on station and also have rearming and refueling points that virtually follow the aircraft around the battlefield. Our definition of "deep attack" missions aren't the same as for our fixed wing counterparts. Those guys have a much greater range and payload than we do but their roles are also different. Id personally much rather engineers research alternate fuel options or more fuel efficient options for rotary wing aircraft rather than trying to create new airframes. The aircraft we have now are fine we just need to figure out how to keep them in the air longer.

In theory yes and no. In reality most people use the FLIR both day and night. Images tend to look "weird" when you start zooming in too much. Kind of like taking a set a nice binoculars and looking at license plates down the road. Yes you can see them but it doesn't look the same as if you were standing right behind the car looking at it with your naked eye. FLIR is just easier, things glow and stick out. In the Abrams the only time I ever used the day sight was to try and verify what I was looking at in case I couldnt quite tell in the FLIR. The next time you are on an airplane and coming in for landing just take a moment and look out of the window and look around outside. Now try to imagine finding a person or a vehicle out there among all of that other stuff with a pair of binoculars. It would be very hard, but if everything man made started glowing then it would be easier.

Hmmm It may not be an official brevity term but something that particular unit uses for a certain situations. I know that we have used different code words that we just sort of made up during the briefing. Everything from Star Wars movie quotes to sports terms. Many of the brevity terms are universal between the services in regards to aviation. I've never heard "front page news" before in Army aviation maybe its an Air Force thing or something they just made up that day to say when they have eyes on their objective or something.

Thanks! I flew tonight and did some more scanning around. I was able to clearly ID what type of cars were driving down the road at about 3500m. Part of this is because I "know" what an F-150 looks like so my brain sort of puts the pieces together but I could still easily tell it was a full sized pickup. We are trained to do the same thing with military vehicles. We go through quite a bit of vehicle identification training to ensure we know what various types of vehicles look like both friend and foe. Due to the training we are able to figure out what things are even if the picture isn't crystal clear. I have an edge in that aspect because I was a tanker before this and we had to do the same things in that field. I can say this. In the Abrams I could identify targets at 4000m under the FLIR. The Apache MTADS is a much better FLIR system than whats in the Abrams so I'm sure I could ID things from much farther. I was trying to look around and find more stuff but its late Friday night and there was literally like 1 car on the road my entire flight. Everyone had already made it to their respected parties or other beer drinking spots by the time we got in the air lol. Hope this helps.

I should have had you training my driver! I still have the scars on my face to this day from that kid smacking my face against the TC's coupling every chance he got lol Took a few months but he finally got it down pretty well. By the time I left that kid was a great driver and I had all of the confidence in the world in him. I'll never forget the day when we were doing a force on force exercise in the mountains of Colorado. I was inside trying to help the gunner fix something for a while so the loader was up top helping the driver navigate. After an extremely slow and bumpy ride I I finally hear the driver tell me we were at our position. I pop out the hatch and see our 68 ton tank had just crawled up a mountain trail made for 4 wheelers and was positioned about 2 feet from the edge of a 400ft cliff with rocks and trees on both sides. He managed to maneuver us up there from the drivers seat with closed hatch with the loader guiding him. Few things are more terrifying than popping out of the hatch and seeing nothing in front of you put a huge canyon. After that day I rarely said a word to him I would just tell him where our position needed to be and sit back and let him get us there. I figure if he could get us up there on the mountain without my help then he doesn't need some guy in the TC's seat drinking a coke telling him what to do. Great kids, I loved my tank crew.

I don't remember the exact resolution numbers for the MTADS I believe it's something like the equivalent of a 900p HDTV. It's very clear the images you see on youtube from gun cams and whatnot don't really do it justice. As far as spotting a tank I can't really give you a precise distance to where you'd be able to identify it. I've seen objects with great clarity at 3000m. I've only shot at training targets but I am sure you'd be able to positively ID a vehicle at that distance and probably from even greater distances. With the zoom capabilities of the MTADS you can literally see people's facial expressions from great distances. Again can't give you precise numbers as I wasn't really paying attention I was just casually looking around. Ill try to pay attention to the actual ranges the next time Im scanning around for things while flying and see if I can get some better numbers and estimates for you.

So once again the weather has decided to come in and I didn't get to fly today :/ I flew around last night practicing flying at night without the use of my HMD (the symbology in your eye). Its amazing how much we rely on that thing and how weird it feels to fly without it in your eye. I almost forgot that I knew how to fly a helicopter without all of the fancy gadgets. Interesting to say the least...

Yes CITV lol, its been a couple years since I was a Tank Commander (dont tell my guys I forgot the name of that thing they'll kill me). Sad part is that I forgot the name so quickly yet I used it everyday for 6 years. My brain has shifted from tanks to helicopters I only have room for so much information up there and Im forgetting much of what I learned as a tanker unfortunately...

Modern tanks do, at least the M1A2 SEP tanks do. The gunners sights are on top of the turret and can see when the tank is in the deflade. They also have a tank commander sight (I forgot the actual name its been awhile, we just called it the R2D2 thing lol) which is also mounted on top of the turret and can see over hills and other obstacles. It proves challenging when training new tank gunners because they often times forget that the sights for the gun are actually higher up than the actual gun itself so they would routinely shoot the side of the hill on accident.

They can to some extent it depends on how thick the clouds are. While flying at night using the PNVS FLIR camera plenty of pilots have accidentally punched into some thin clouds while not even noticing. I actually did it about 3 weeks ago myself. IP kept saying we needed to drop altitude because he couldn't see due to the cloud layer yet everything looked perfectly clear in the FLIR.

No I'm not a part of those forums. Internet is getting more and more crowded, I've used this same name for over 15 years and that's the first time I've heard of anyone else with it lol.

haha thats hilarious. If only we had hidden cameras with us everywhere overseas I'm pretty sure the general public would honestly believe we had lost our minds. I can't count the number of times I have walked into the tent and seen the most outrageous of things and simply shook my head and walked out lol. Like they say, war is 99% boring and 1% sheer terror. Gotta do something to keep from being bored lol.

The problem is that the helicopter pitches and rolls left almost instantaneously. So yes it will slow down technically but you will also likely be in an extreme left dive if not inverted. The lift produced by the right side is so great that without the left side being able to compensate it has the force to flip the aircraft over. We are taught to slow down the second you even think you are encountering retreating blade stall. Usually by the time it actually happens it is too late to do anything about it. I don't personally know of anyone who has recovered the aircraft from it once it has pitched up and rolled left. I have heard plenty of stories of people who have unfortunately died from it. Since the only real way to get into it is to be in a pretty steep dive you must think of the flight profile at the time. The aircraft is already in a steep dive now imagine being in a steep dive then getting flipped upside down then trying to flip right side up and pull up at those high airspeeds without destroying the aircraft. Helos aren't nearly as maneuverable as jets in that aspect. I think you may be thinking that the pitch up and roll happens slowly, however, it does not. It happens almost as fast as a fighter jet doing a barrel roll. The stabilator (tailplane) in the 64 adjusts itself automatically according to the aircraft speed. We can manually control it as well if we need to do so for certain situations. You are correct that in level flight it tends to be horizontal while at a hover it is tilted at an angle. It's not used for steering it's used to help with climbs and dives.

Very interesting. thank you.

So would the Vne limiting factor of the KA-50 be due to the limited amount of blade flapping that can occur to compensate for disymmetry of lift because of the close proximity of the blades to one another? Since the rotor disks spin opposite each other then retreating blade stall should still occur simultaneously on both disks but on opposite sides of each disk right? So they cancel each other out like you said. Why does the upper rotor disk generate more lift than the lower? Shouldn't they produce equal lift on opposite sides of the disk?

Just a correction to what I said about Gyroscopic precesion. The action happens 90 degrees after the input is made not 45 degrees. I was halfway busy multitasking when I wrote that and wasn't paying attention.

When you look at the videos of the helicopters doing barrel rolls and other high G maneuvers pay attention to the rotor system. You will notice the blades are "coning". The blades are getting stressed almost to the limit and theoretically they can literally rip off of the rotor hub if they cone too much. It's mainly the rotor system that will be stressed. When the helicopter goes past its max speed, called Vne (Velocity Never Exceed) we run into what is called Retreating Blade Stall. The rotor blades can flap up and down to equalize the lift throughout the rotor disk. At some point the blades on the left side simply cannot flap enough to equalize the lift of the right side so the system will stall. A physics phenomena known as Gyroscopic Precession means that in regards to a rotating disk any input made on the disk will actually be applied 45 degrees after the input is made. Sort of like when you take a bike tire and spin it on your hand and try to tilt it to the right you notice it actually tilts forward. So whenever the helicopter rotor system stalls the right side (which has more lift) produces that lift but that lift is applied 45 degrees later so it lifts the front of the rotor system up. So when you exceed the helicopters max airspeed it causes the aircraft to pitch up and roll left. When getting into retreating blade stall the best thing to do is to slow down immediately so that the rotor system can equalize its lift again. This phenomena is the reason why helicopters are limited so such slow airspeeds when compared to fixed wing aircraft. Shaking may be experienced when entering retreating blade stall but it usually happens so fast that there is often very little notice. I'm not sure if any helicopter can actually exceed their Vne while cruising at max power in level flight. I'm sure if there was a massive tail wind they probably could. The only way for the AH-64 to exceed its Vne under normal conditions would be in a dive. BTW those 2.2G limits are arbitrary. The 64 can pull maneuvers higher than that its more of a "don't do this all the time you might break something eventually" limit. Hope this helps!

Yeah unfortunately our G limit is 2.2G's. Part of me still calls bull on that though because we pull some turns and dives that I swear feel a lot more than 2.2g's on a regular basis. Maybe it just feels different since its a helicopter.

Yeah one of the first questions many people always ask is if I have ever done a barrel roll in the 64. I always laugh and say no what you see on tv isn't what we can actually do. Well yes we "can" do it but it's not something we do. You'll be hard pressed to find anybody who has ever actually done the maneuvers we see in the airshow videos. The 64 is an awesome aircraft but its still a helicopter. We are not Top Gun lol.