Pave Hawk replacement expected to bust budget
An Air Force effort to get new helicopters to rescue units “as rapidly as possible” has failed to deliver and could cost the service hundreds of millions of dollars more than planned, according to officials and documents.
Launched in 2009, the HH-60 Operational Loss Replacement program was meant to buy about two dozen helicopters to replace HH-60G Pave Hawks destroyed in combat or aged into uselessness. It was also meant to do it quickly — or at least far more quickly than the service could replace its entire combat search-and-rescue fleet.
Now, though, it appears the stopgap aircraft will deploy no sooner than mid-2014, just a few years ahead of a plan to replace the entire CSAR fleet. And these modified, rush-order UH-60Ms could ultimately cost some $39 million apiece, according to military and industry officials. That’s 50 percent more than the HH-60Gs they are replacing, according to an Air Force fact sheet.
Why the extra expense? One reason is that the Air Force, perhaps gun-shy of industry involvement after mounting a host of aircraft competitions that have collapsed, is considering paying the Army to do the modifications rather than contracting the work out. And the Army program has had problems of its own.
German U-boats refuelled in Ireland? Surely not
Never a man to neglect a good tale, I return to that old saw about German U-boats refuelling in neutral Ireland. Not because I believe it – I spent much of my PhD thesis on Ireland in the Second World War disproving it. But because a reader has sent me a fascinating account of his dad's war service as an SOE recruit.
He was an expert in bomb disposal, demolition and sabotage, trained at Brickendonbury Manor, near Hertford, with the rank of lieutenant and later attached to the Royal Navy in Derry – or Londonderry, as all good Protestants and Brits would at the time have called the last of our Irish Treaty Ports. The other three had been cheerfully handed over to de Valera by Malcolm MacDonald in 1938, earning Churchill's most poisonous hatred.
In 1940, our man – his reader-son asks for anonymity – was sent to a base unit at HMS Ferret in Derry with five members of 30 Commando, Royal Marines; their job was to "prepare and supply equipment" (incendiary and explosive charges) for 15 marines and two officers aboard the "Royal Fleet Auxiliary Tugboat Tamara which was disguised as a trawler".
FGB Refueling: Starting at ~9:30pm, propellants will be transferred by ground command from the Progress 42P tanks via the DC1 Docking Compartment to the FGB long high-pressure fuel and oxidizer tanks (BVDG for the UDMH fuel, & BVDO for the NTO and more »
It's a real shame, considering the extensive audio input credentials, including an in-dash six-stack CD player with MP3 capability, USB connectivity, 3.5mm auxiliary input, and Bluetooth audio streaming. Cabin interactivity between passengers is helped
