Friday - April 15, 2011
LAAR She Blows! Part One
used to force a winner in an aircraft competition
that reinvents the wheel for at least the 3rd time
because the definition keeps changing
That has to be the longest post title I’ve ever used. I’m going to try and keep this post as concise as possible, but that won’t be easy. RightWingNews asked me to stick my oar in the water about the flap over the choice of aircraft for the LAAR mission profile. Should the US choose the US built Hawker-Beechcraft AT-6B, or the Brazilian built Embraer Super Tucano? Both are decent little airplanes with similar performance specs, and both would cost the taxpayers ridiculous amounts of money when put into service, primarily because of all the bells, whistles, digital gee-gaws and other wonderland gimgcrackery the Air Force demands get added on to aid the flight crew with their onerous mission of flying somewhere slowly, shooting 3 raggies on a camel, and then flying slowly home. So before I get into details and politics, let’s step back a second and figure out what this “necessary” mission is, and why it demands a whole new airplane.
LAAR stands for Light Attack and Armed Reconnaissance. It’s fly-guy speak for a catch all mission category that sort of includes flying somewhere, looking around, blowing a few things up, providing a moderate amount of support (ie bullets and small rockets or missiles) to ground troops, may include ground rescue of a small number of troops, and usually includes the ability to take off and land on less than perfect runways. And that’s where the problem is. Because the definition keeps changing, the requirements for a suitable aircraft keep changing. These days the definition includes low levels of maintenance by stupid people, which is my rendition of the USAF’s more diplomatic way of saying we want to also sell these planes to other nations who may not have the best ground crews.
Once upon a time, before and during WWII, when the military wanted to fly somewhere and see what was up they had a couple of airplanes just for that. If it was a short flight over land, the Army had their version of a Piper Cub, a little bitty plane borrowed from the civilian aviation world. It could take off and land on a postage stamp, it flew along slow enough that if it was a car it wouldn’t get a speeding ticket on the highways in NJ, and it could carry a pilot and his camera a good distance out and back. If it was a long flight over water, the Navy had their PBY Catalina. It wasn’t fast either, but it could go a very long way and if it ran out of gas you could land it in the ocean. The PBY was big enough to have a few guys onboard, and could carry a machine gun or two to defend itself or provide very limited ground support. Come to think of it, a new PBY with a couple of little missiles hung on the wings would be a superb airplane for dealing with Somali pirates.
Neither of these airplanes was suited for any kind of actual combat. When getting shot at crept into the mission definition, reconnaissance was done by fighters and bombers that had a gun or two removed and cameras put in. It worked, and at a fairly low cost.
After that war, and during and after the Korean war, the mission changed again. Now it placed more emphasis on ground support and eventually added small rescue ability to the mix. While the US Marines had seen quite a lot of success in WWII using their Corsairs, Thunderbolts, and whatever else they could get off the runway with guns attached to help out their brothers in the mud, the All New Air Force wanted something better and more specifically suited to the task.
During the 50s and early 60s they had a plethora of choices. Even given their developing allergy to gasoline which demanded everything that flew ran on jet fuel, the aircraft available for LAAR work was so wide that the missions themselves could be broken down further and re-categorized. They had those little bug eye Bell 47 helicopters, the ones you saw in every M*A*S*H episode at the slow, low, and close end, everything left over from WWII in the middle, and all their jet fighters and bombers at the fast, high, and speedy end. And the job got done.
Vietnam saw both divergence and specialization in the LAAR role. When the mission was too far away for helicopters, or required more time over target than they could provide, but either required more speed or less firepower and/or rescue capacity and/or runway length than suited the DC-3 gunship, they still could choose between the Rockwell OV-10 Bronco and the Douglas A-1 Skyraider.
The Bronco was a strange looking little airplane with a very short nose, a very large glass canopy, twin turboprop engines mounted on very thin booms, and a high horizontal elevator mounted between them. It couldn’t go 300mph, but it could go 1400 miles, and with 4 machine guns and 7 hardpoints for attaching bombs and missiles it could provide quite a lot of ground support. And turboprops run on jet fuel, so the Air Force was happy.
The Skyraider was an odd duck, but a very sturdy one. It was designed at the end of WWII as a torpedo bomber, and was the largest single engine military airplane ever built. Picture a P-47 in your mind, then basically double the dimensions. The “Sandy” had enough built in cannons, hardpoints and carrying capacity to make it a more formidable plane than a B-17. And it could fly faster and a bit further than the OV-10. Plus it’s rugged design could eat bullets for breakfast and keep right on flying. In an emergency you could cram several GIs inside the fuselage and get the hell out of Dodge. This plane was a real winner, and 3,000 of them were built in all sorts of variations. It could even carry nukes. But it ran on gasoline, so I guess it had to go.
At some point during that conflict, somebody in a blue uniform got the idea that smaller and faster would be better, and maybe even cheaper. So they took the T-37 “tweet”, a tiny jet used to train pilots, and sent it off to war. Add in some bigger engines, some combat avionics, a few extra hardpoints, etc., and the A-37 was born. Maybe it couldn’t take off and land in a muddy cow pasture like the Skyraider, and maybe it only had half the range of the Bronco. But it could zoom across the sky at more than 500 miles, and it could strap on twice the weight of bang bang goodies than the Bronco could.
All three of these airplanes were relatively inexpensive.
And then the LAAR mission changed again. And again. And again. Now the mission is several missions. Let’s take a quick look.
When the “L” in LAAR became an “H”, for Heavy, for that job we got the A-10 Thunderbolt, aka the Warthog. This thing is a flying battleship, an armor plated machine gun cannon with an airplane built around it, designed to go toe to toe with a platoon of tanks and win. And it does. But it’s very expensive, and like all military jets it has significant maintenance costs.
When the LA went away and just reconnaissance was needed we have some pretty amazing satellites in orbit. We used to have the ultra fast SR-71 Blackbird for when a fast spy plane was required. We’re still flying the U-2 spy plane, 56 years after it first rolled out. We have a whole plethora of UAVs, from the little bitty ones the size of hawks up to the rather large Reaper. The Reaper can fly really high (12 miles up), really far, and can take the fight to the enemy by carrying more than a dozen Hellfire missiles or a couple of medium bombs. It isn’t very fast though.
So why do we need a manned LAAR airplane at all? Damned if I know, but I think the answer uses the words “situational awareness”. That means that an actual pilot or two in the airplane can see a whole lot more than any UAVs camera can, and see it faster and understand it faster than the kid flying the UAV back in Odgen Utah can wiggle his joystick.
So we need a manned one. Fine. What’s wrong with any of the last 3 or 4 planes, the last of which only retired a couple years ago? Nothing. In my opinion the job would be amply filled by bringing back the P-47. But now politics enters the picture, along with dreams of foreign sales, and the new generation of “mission requirements” that the Air Force has fapped up. And that leads me to my next post, which is what I was actually asked to write about. This whole post is just for setting the stage. Groundwork. Making the point that the Air Force - even before it actually existed - has been doing the Light Attack thing quite well, and has been and continues to do the “And Reconnaissance” thing exceptionally well. They made the decision to do the last part without pilots a few years ago, but now they want to have their cake and eat it too. And want us taxpayers to spend tens or hundreds of millions so they can claim they’re saving money by using a few gallons less jet fuel.
Oh, I’d like to add that I’ve heard that the Army has a recon gizmo of their own. It’s literally a one shot deal: they have some kind of TV camera on a parachute that can be fired from a grenade launcher that gives them a Right Now view of what’s going on behind the next hill. This is probably because the Marines were doing the same job with a box kite, a length of string, and an iPhone programmed to send pictures every half second to Facebook. No, I jest. It was two lengths of string.
Posted by Drew458
on 04/15/2011 at 01:54 PM
Filed Under: • Military •
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