[High-Tech/Vehicles] Rugged, Simple SAR/Medevac Helicopters

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by phayman53

There are several of problems with using the HH-52 though:

1) They are really old. The last one was built in 1969. While that doesn't mean you couldn't get one flying reliably, helicopters age significantly worse than fixed wing aircraft. You could get UH-1s that have much younger airframes. There is also a difference between getting sobering ready for occasional historical flights and combat operations.
2) Only 175 were ever built. That is a pretty small number compared to the more than 16,000 UH-1s of all variants. Finding surviving ones that can be made air worthy and cannibalizing parts will be much more difficult..

Those are certainly serious issues.

Basically, it looks like we'd want as many as we could plausibly get and keep running without spending obscene amounts that could better be devoted to line items that yield more benefit to their operations. That might be anywhere from one to three machines, but I expect that only one would regularly be ready for ops. And they wouldn't use them unless the mission profile suggested no other helicopter they had access to might work, probably because they expected severe Mana peaks.

Are there any other amphibious helicopters that might exist in greater (operational) numbers by 2018?

Originally Posted by phayman53

3) It's performance was not great. It's speed topped it at 95 knots and it cruised at 85 knots. Even for a helicopter, that is a bit on the slow side. By comparison, the UH-1 cruises at 109 knots and tops out at 117 knots.

It does have the not insignificant advantage of being able to actually land in the water though, and it has 1.5x the range than the UH-1, so there are advantages.

As modern helicopters are available (through offshore oil logistical companies like ERA Group Inc. and PHI Inc. if nothing else), the archaic models would only be used for highly specialized work, where electronics tend to fail and devices with a lot of history and personal attention have significant advantages. As such, it's acceptable if they have lower performance than newer machines that might not function reliably anyway.

Besides, there will definitely be at least one Sikorsky S-61 helicopter available exclusively for occult support over water. I'm looking for smaller helicopters, for operations with a smaller footprint, to supplement it.