Hartford Courant (Connecticut) November 8, 2003
Flying Targets: Copter Designers Must Weight Safety, Efficiency
By Michael Remez
Coming less than a week after the deadly downing of a Chinook helicopter in Iraq, Friday's Black Hawk crash near Tikrit highlighted the vulnerability of helicopters in a war zone.
Investigators worked throughout the day to determine whether the Connecticut-built chopper had been hit by enemy fire. At the scene, officers suspected that a rocket-propelled grenade, a relatively unsophisticated weapon, had forced the crash that left six American soldiers dead.
U.S. forces depend on helicopters such as the Chinook and the Black Hawk to move troops and equipment quickly and efficiently, but the speed and agility come at a price. They also are large, low-flying targets for an enemy eager to create havoc and kill Americans.
And they are vulnerable. Because of the technologies that allow helicopters to fly, the right hit -- such as to the stabilizing tail rotor -- makes it nearly impossible for the chopper to stay in the air.
That has been an issue for American war planners since Vietnam, where U.S. forces lost more than 3,000 helicopters. In the years since, the Pentagon and contractors such as Sikorsky Aircraft and Boeing Co. have sought the right balance between a helicopter's critical mission and the safety equipment that would help it survive an attack or an accident.
Stratford-based Sikorsky, a division of United Technologies Corp., says it has taken many steps to boost the safety of its Black Hawk helicopters -- crash-resistant troop seats, armored components, self-sealing fuel tanks and an airframe designed to crush progressively on impact, for example -- but the risks are still great.
"You are in combat. There is risk. We know things will occur," said John Wakefield, Sikorsky vice president and chief safety officer. "The objective of what we are doing is to protect the occupants of that helicopter."
Army helicopters also are equipped with systems capable of detecting and deflecting oncoming guided or heat-seeking missiles, said Maj. Gary Tallman, an Army spokesman, who added that a next generation system is slated to go into production next year.
Army sources told The Associated Press that the Boeing-built Chinook shot down last weekend apparently had a last-second warning of an approaching missile and managed to launch flares designed to draw the heat-seeking missile away. But the defensive move did not work and 16 soldiers were killed in the crash.
And if the Black Hawk that went down Friday near the banks of the Tigris River was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade -- the same weapon that took out two American Black Hawks in Somalia in 1993 -- the new technologies provide little help. The crash site was just miles from where another Black Hawk was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade last month, that time without fatalities.
"There is a reason this has been a weapon of choice for a long time," said John Pike, a military analyst and founder of GlobalSecurity.org. "Unlike more sophisticated heat-seeking or radar guided missiles, it requires no guidance beyond good eyesight and bravery."
That means it shoots straight toward a target from close range, instead of chasing a signal, and is less easily diverted. The rocket-propelled grenades are ubiquitous in Iraq and available to guerrilla fighters cheaply on the black market, said Christopher Hellman, director of the Washington-based Project on Military Spending Oversight.
"The countermeasures we have, ironically enough, work better against more sophisticated systems," Hellman said.
Pike said the newer systems can't eliminate the problem, but they can help reduce successful attacks on American aircraft. He said special operations units already have more sophisticated versions because of their more dangerous missions.
But he said U.S. forces can reduce the risk of attack by reducing the enemy's opportunities.
"It has to do more with tactics, techniques and procedures than hardware," he said.
American planners, for example, must vary the times of takeoffs and landings to keep adversaries off guard. They could expand the security perimeter near the site where the helicopters come and go and increase security patrols, Pike said.
"I assume all the helicopter operators in Iraq are looking very closely at what has happened in these incidents to reduce the probability that it will happen again," he added.
Sikorsky's Wakefield said helicopter makers also are working on new technologies that will help reduce the vulnerability of future aircraft. For example, development of the Army's long planned Comanche has brought advances in making helicopters more stealthy, reducing their profiles and introducing more electronic systems, which should make the helicopters better able to withstand hits from light weapons, he said.
© Copyright 2003, The Hartford Courant Company
