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Did this system for surface-to-air recovery more or less get its lunch eaten by helicopters? Still, pretty neat.
by bmgxyz 7y ago
Did this system for surface-to-air recovery more or less get its lunch eaten by helicopters?
Still, pretty neat.
- alkonaut 7y ago970km one way is very long for a helicopter. That's the reason they didn't use one in this case. I'm not sure if there are any helicopters to this day that will do 2000km without refueling. Helicopters these days can at least get one way, so the simplest solution today would probably be dropping return fuel from a cargo plane or doing in-flight refueling of a helicopter.
- anamexis 7y agoOut of curiosity, wouldn't refueling the helicopter in-flight require another helicopter (with the same range problem)?
- londons_explore 7y agoI don't know if this was done, but it's totally possible to get a helicopter to carry a tank of fuel and leave it floating midway in the ocean (or on ice strong enough to land on). You can then go back, refuel, and this time go the whole way, stopping off for fuel at your new midway point. You just need to make sure you don't forget where you put the fuel!
- jsight 7y agoMid-air refueling a helicopter does not require another helicopter. It could be a KC-130.
- mattkrause 7y agoIf you have enough equipment, you can set up a relay where tankers themselves get refueled by other tankers. This can dramatically extend the range of a small number of aircraft, though the logistics (and expense) gets out of hand quickly. The British did this during the Falklands War in 1982. In Operation Black Buck, a bomber from Ascension Island (near the equator), attacked Port Stanley Airport (~52°S, about 12000 km away). To do so, the bomber was refueled 7 times on the way out (and once on the return), while a fleet of tankers refueled each other 9 more times. Wikipedia has a diagram showing how this worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck#/media/File:Refuelling.plan.black.buck.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck#/media/Fi...
- gwern 7y agoIs that equivalent to the 'rocket equation', where each tanker is analogous to another stage on the rocket? (You spend increasing amounts of fuel to get the fuel out to where it needs to be transferred in to be then burned.)
- mattkrause 7y agoSeems very similar to me, though the constraints are a bit different: you want the tankers back, presumably, but you also don't have to move all of it together
- ceejayoz 7y agoNo. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Pave_Hawk_refueled_by_HC-130_Hercules_over_Tallil_Air_Base_Iraq.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Pave_Haw...
- anamexis 7y agoWow, that looks terrifying with the rotor so close to the plane!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dkarp 7y agoA tilt-rotor aircraft like the V-22 Osprey would have the necessary range unlike a standard helicopter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Boeing_V-22_Osprey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Boeing_V-22_Osprey
- mattkrause 7y agoThe V-22 entered service 45 years after this happened though, which made its use....challenging.
- jacobush 7y agoMade me think of Hunt for Red October. Helicopter range is a (minor) plot device there.