Refurbishment works when there is an off the shelf upgrade and life extension available, they tend to fall over or blowout when you go it alone, especially on a small fleet.
Agree completely.
I think it would be pointless, and rather expensive too, for Australia to go it alone and upgrade / life extend a relatively small number of the existing Blackhawk fleet for another 20 or 30 years of service.
Sure a rather basic refurbishment can be done to the aircraft, refurbish the major components such as engines, transmission, rotor head, etc, refurbish the airframe, fix any corrosion or structural cracks, and yes at the end of the day you could end up with a near zero timed airframe, engines and transmission, but the aircraft will be full of 30 year old components.
One problem that I understand the Army has had to deal with in recent years is that our Blackhawks use 'analogue' engine control units instead of modern 'digital' (that everyone else uses) and that of course leads to issues with obtaining spare parts, so you go ahead and replace them during the refurbishment too, but that is the thin edge of the wedge, where do you start and stop in replacing old and obsolete components and systems??
Next thing would probably be to replace the cockpit with a modern digital system as used in the UH-60M, for example, no doubt you would want to replace all the very old and out of production obsolete systems, but how much is all this going to cost and where is the facility in this country to produce a very small production run?
The project is starting to sound like the old story about "Grandad's axe", it's 60 years old now, still works as well as the day it was bought, yes its had four new handles and two new heads in that time, but it's still Grandad's same old axe (not!).
If you look at the MH-60R project, yes the first few airframes were remanufactured B's, but they scrapped that idea and went with all new construction, not to say there isn't success stories with large scale remanufacture, the Chinook is the perfect example.
From A to D all used the same reconditioned airframe and added new components, but with the current F standard the situation is now completely different, yes a 'new' or 'refurbished' F can be purchased (apparently the difference in prices is only a few million, not tens of millions), but even the refurbished F's don't use the previous airframe, it's scrapped, and replaced with a whole brand new monolithic airframe (the major airframe components are machined out of single pieces rather than riveted together), it's only the major systems such as engines and transmission that are zero timed and installed onto the new airframe.
As I understand it, the current UH-60M also uses monolithic airframe construction too, if Australia was to go ahead with a refurbishment of say, 12 -18, of the best of the Blackhawk airframes, we would end up with an orphan hybrid fleet that I could imagine would be expensive and difficult to maintain as they age into the future, just doesn't seem worth it, economically or for practical reasons either.
So what’s the solution for the Special Forces to have the appropriate aircraft to support its operations?
Obviously there is the MRH-90, yes there are question marks hanging over the MRH-90’s, but it will be interesting to see where the French get to with modifying their NH-90’s for special forces work, if that all fails and their experience isn’t satisfactory for Australian operations, the obvious candidate would appear to be an appropriate number of new built UH-60M’s, with whatever special forces specific modifications that are required, and possibly a number of MH-47G’s too, if the requirement was additionally appropriate too.
So what do we do with the old Blackhawks and Seahawks?
Back in 2010 ‘Team Romeo’, when they were bidding the MH-60R for the Seahawk replacement, proposed that they would consider setting up a facility (from memory I believe they were suggesting Nowra as the site) to ‘refurbish and de-militarise’ the combined 50 retired Blackhawks and Seahawks for on sale to various approved police and paramilitary organisations, but since that time I haven’t heard one word about that actually becoming reality (sort of like a politicians promise prior to an election, but disappears after!), so I wouldn’t be holding my breath about that one ever happening.
That really only leaves a couple of options, keep a few selected airframes of each type for aviation museums and try and sell the remainder to another country (that the US would approve of) for the best price possible and let them become someone else problem, or if the remainder can’t be sold, then that only leave stripping and scrapping.
