Fast Track Chinook Order – Go on Gordon
Go on Gordon, you know you want to.
The FT is reporting that Gordon brown is considering a fast track order process in order to get at least 20 Chinooks into service in the next couple of years, avoiding the usual tendering process and just handing Boeing a big fat cheque with a handwritten note attached that says crack on.
Hold on though, the FT also reports that low priority defence projects will be cut or stretched out to find the estimated £1billion needed. A new Chinook to the latest spec with all the optional extras is reported to cost at most £25million so for a billion, with some economies of scale surely one would expect anywhere between 40 and 50 depending on how hard a bargain we drove. The usual extras such as loogistics, training and documentation are already in place so either the previously reported costs of a Chinook are wildly out of kilter with reality or the sums are wrong.
It will be interesting to see what ‘low priority’ projects are just hanging around waiting to be cut without anyone noticing.
Helicopters have become symbolic of forces underfunding and the Labour Party know this is a serious political weakness that will be exploited by EVERY SINGLE opposition party at the next election, so for anyone to think this isn’t a political decison is somewhat naive.
The Future Medium Helicopter programme was expected to replace the Sea King junglies and Pumas in service with the Fleet Air Arm and RAF. As we have blogged before the logical winner of this would be a tail fold Merlin but it is quite feasible that FMH will be delayed or even cancelled in favour of this.
Expect lots of opposition from South West MP’s and the defence industry lobby.
When they are complaining about a lack of proper competition perhaps someone might gently remind them of the Lynx Wildcat contract and politely request they shut up.
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Dominic
Is flying / maintaining a Chinook that much different than a Puma or Gazelle – answer, yep it sure is, but everything is relative.
Can’t compare the Gazelle for either flying or maintaining its apples to oranges.
Puma – well, ancient Puma’s are bound to take a lot of maintenance hours per flying hour. Brand new CH47F’s might even require less maint. / flying hour even though they are bigger and more complex machines.
Would it be that difficult to re-train aircrew and ground crew ? No, of course not, I am sure some of those ‘Crabs’ are quite bright fellows….. :-)
But seriously, it just takes time, thats the problem. Familiarization with whole new piece of kit with all sorts of new bits in it, with new ways to mend them, and while I have flown in lots of military helo’s, I have never had my hands on the collective and stick, but I presume flying the Chinook would be quite different from a Puma (bigger, more powerful, twin rotors etc)so ‘re-training’ the pilots would take time – don’t forget to add some nice high fidelity simulators (from CAE ?) to the overall bill.
Wasnt something announced recently about moving to a single chinook standard?
Presumably these?
A question Jed if you dont mind
Is flying/maintaining a puma or a gazelle that much different than flying a chinook?
Assuming the funds are there, and if we’re paying £500m over the usual price, lets assume they are, would it be that difficult to train all the current helicopter crew to maintain/repair/fly chinooks instead of pumas?
Oh! look a whole f**king squadron of pigs was just practicing formation flying outside my window. I would say this order happening and flying pigs would have the same chance of happening.
On a more serious note, if it did happen there would be little point in my eyes. I would like to be out of Afghanistan in a few years maybe the end of 2012 with drawdown starting at the start of the year. At the earliest we might get these helicopters when mid 2012? in my opinion that is far too late to be of any help. If we do stay longer then yes they might be of some use but im pretty sure this government will find a way to cock it up even although it should be simple. “Hello! Boeing we would like 20 standard CH-47F” “Yes certainly that’ll be *quotes price*” “Thank you here is a cheque for the required amount”. Instead im pretty sure the MoD will cock it up by insisting on UK content and they will be around a year late with kit missing.
Then as is rightly mentioned there is no new money being provided for this, things are merely being shuffled around to create a bigger mess for the next government to sort out. This could bugger up other more important projects just for some PR points. In the longer term i would rather see the UK consider a switch to the CH-53K as it would be ship deployable. Mind you i’ve no idea if it fits in a C-17 and i would guess not so maybe it’s a bonkers idea.
Dominic you may also wish to point out some of the Kit we get is not really fit for purpose, for instance the Jackal was introduced to provide more mine protection. All i would say is you don’t need more than a few brain cells to work out the problem with that concept. Also i would take around a nice big pie chart showing where the money goes, i think some people will be slightly pissed off to see we will be spending more money paying debt Interest that defending the nation. Don’t forget that’s interest not actually paying anything off should go down well with people.
Even better, if someone brings it up, it can be pointed out that actualy, he’s only leaked it to see if the polls improve enough for it to be worth doing.
I wasnt trying to move the thread over to politics, just explain generaly why defence is going to be a complete disaster for Labour in the election, regardless of what they do
Not really pointless in the overall scheme of things, BUT, by the time they are built, pilots are found from somewhere and trained, maintainers are found from somewhere, and trained, etc it will be quite a while before they could show up in theatre – BUT if we are in it for the really long haul, then it might indeed be worth it.
However, logistics are absolutely NOT in place already, new build U.S. CH47F Chinooks (which could be built by August Westland in Italy)are completely different from the Chinooks we now fly, and so the logistics would need to be setup, and it would be better to buy 20 with loads of spares than 40 with non !
But this is only speculation and an article from the FT
Nothing has been announced yet
But unless he can buy them and get them in theatre before the election, it will be too little too late.
Indeed, the fact that he’s had to pay double the usual price and rush them in is just going to be seen as proof that Labour are soft on defence and “our brave boys” are getting blwon apart whilst Brown dithers.
This is going to be my “go to” defence story when canvassing now,
“Yeah Browns finaly accepted we need more helicopters in theatre, but we first said we needed more helicopters back in 2007, if we had been in charge, we wouldnt be getting 20 chinooks in the future, we’d have 50 additional frames out there right now, and we wouldnt be cutting funding from IED Counter Measures or other areas to pay for them either.”
If they’re receptive, I’d keep going on about general under funding, the lack of MRAPs and whatever else I can remember numbers for.