I love helicopters. I love the look of them, the sound of them, the idea of them. If I could wake up tomorrow and have spent years in a dream practicing any skill, I’d be a helicopter pilot.
And I saw a picture of the Comanche. As soon as I put on a pair of clean underwear, I got to wondering - why isn’t this thing real? Why did it get dropped? I read on Wikipedia that it’s because of high costs, but that’s never even slowed down the military in this country. Aren’t the Apaches starting to show their age?
And, on a similar topic, why don’t all helicopters have fenestrons? What does ‘less tail rotor authority in crosswind situations’ even mean?
Probably because it was a bogus project to get the Russians to spend lots of money. Same thing happened with the Crusader artillery project. Supposedly zillions spent and then suddenly cancelled due to costing too much. It might have been a fake all along.
Like chacoguy said, people speculate that Comanche tech was adapted for use in other stealth helicopters.
Also, while the Comanche program was still under development, unmanned drones started to come into their own. What could a Comanche do that a few Predators armed with Hellfires couldn’t do better?
The Comanche spent forever and a day in R&D with huge cost overruns. It takes its own sweet time doing so and wastes billions before doing it, but the Pentagon does eventually pull the plug sometimes. See for instance the XB-70 Valkyrie, M247 Sergeant York/DIVADS, FGR-17 Viper and MBT-70.
I expect that a large reason simply was that nobody wanted it. It was original intended to be a stealthy scout helicopter with limited offensive capabilities. It wasn’t designed as a replacement for the AH-64, but to run around spotting artillery and guiding AT missiles for a AH-64 hovering behind a hill somewhere.
In the end it turned out to be a pointless project. UAVs made the reconnaissance role obsolete, while the Longbow radar upgrade to the AH-64D meant that the Apache could engage targets while exposing only the top of its rotor over the horizon. The internal bays of the Comanche couldn’t carry enough of a payload to make it an effective tank killer, and adding wing pylons for additional arms negated all stealth features.
I think that an additional feature was that the helicopter’s importance as a tank killer was overestimated prior to Desert Storm. As it turned out, A-10s (which were at that point going out of fashion) turned out to be far more reliable, hardy and deadly for hunting armor. Since then, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) that the gunship’s role has shifted more to close in support for infantry.
The AH-64 is an attack helicopter, the RAH-66 was a reconnaissance aircraft with a secondary attack ability. Two different roles.
And it was abandoned because it was very expensive and UAVs can do the job just as well, for a fraction of the cost, and without risking two crew members.
And without risking a $50million platform on each sortie. That alone would have crippled its usefulness. One suspects it was fast becoming such an expensive asset that no-one would be prepared to risk it in the role that it was designed for. This would not be the first time such a fate has befallen an aircraft.
And maybe, to generalize, a better way to think of the question is not “Why was the Comanche canceled?” but “Why do we still need pilots?”
In general, when you take out the pilot, you can get smaller, lighter, faster, cheaper, more maneuverable, stealthier, etc. flying vehicles. For the time being, some missions still call for a pilot, but stealth recon and light attack apparently wasn’t one of them.
Even when you want stationary, low-speed support, there are already helicopter UAVs like the military’s MQ-8 or consumer quadrocopters. More and more aircraft (and other things) are roboticizing.
The rise of UAVs was a factor, but not really as big of one as people are making it out to be. Basically, the Comanche program was a disaster. It was behind schedule, over budget, and with $7 billion spent, the taxpayer had only received two prototypes. What’s more, the program would simply be unaffordable moving forward.
To illustrate how unaffordable the program was, the Army had budgeted funds for the production of Comanche. For the money it had budgeted, after termination the Army simply said, all those funds that were for Comanche are now for three aviation programs: the MQ-1 Gray Eagle (the Army version of the Predator), the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (which ran over budget and was cancelled four years later), and the C-27 cargo plane (which the Army decided to transfer to the Air Force five years later). When you cancel one program and get three big acquisition programs out of the same amount of money, you know that original program was really too costly.
As far as UAVs go, the Army has indeed embraced them, but not yet to the detriment of scout helicopters. That’s just not yet a capability trade that has been made yet, but I think it is almost inevitable.
It’s also worth mentioning that the Comanche had been originally designed specifically as a single-crewed aircraft, but at some point the requirements were changed to specify two crew.
Part of the idea behind making it single-crewed in the first place was not just “we don’t need another person for this role,” but “another person (and survival gear, and instrumentation for that person’s role, and so on) adds a LOT of weight and takes up significant space – getting rid of the second crewmember will do a lot to improve the helicopter.”
So when the requirement was changed (for whatever reason – hidebound leadership not wanting something too radical, or plain old feature creep?) to add the second crewmwmber back in, the Comanche immediately became much more like the Apache than its original smaller/lighter/faster/farther concept had been.
So the convergence of three issues: huge cost, emerging replacement of its role by drones, and the fact that the program was becoming more and more like a helicopter we already had instead of something radically different, eventually proved insurmountable, even though such programs are usually pretty hard to terminate.
But aren’t all their programs? If the military wants something badly enough, don’t they usually get it one way or another? It seems like it was more a “it wasn’t worth it because the need just wasn’t great and UAVs filled the role closely enough” versus “it wasn’t worth it even though we needed it”.
This is the fate of every single military project in the 21st century (and most before that following World War II). Cost overruns happen with virtually every military project because someone sets a standard, the standard is met, and then everybody puts their fingers in the pie wanting this capability or that until the equipment is no longer good at anything anymore. Military equipment cannot be everything to everyone. They tried that with the F-111 (née TFX), and it ended up being a barely adequate medium bomber. The Joint Strike Fighter is dealing with the same issues as we speak.
The Comanche died because it cost too much, it was already obsolete, but most importantly it took way too long to be developed because of the desire to make it do a million things it wasn’t designed for. If it had been a short 5-year process we’d be fielding them right now. Instead it died under the weight of unreasonable expectations and the obsolescence created by the passage of time.
No, because just like millionaires, just because you have a lot of money doesn’t mean you don’t have a budget. There isn’t a tree of money that furnishes the military with its use; the military has to make priorities and trades just like everyone else. If something is a high enough priority that one is willing to divert resources from other things that one can go without, one can afford a lot more stuff. But buying a stealthy helicopter and sacrificing modernized ground combat vehicles, next-generation radios, fleets of UAVs, new howitzers, and a bunch of other stuff? That doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe a mix of the two. Stealthy scout helicopters in an age of fighting insurgents in backward Middle Eastern countries? Seriously, why?
But let me say again, UAVs were not the cause of the demise of Comanche. After Comanche, the Army began a new program, the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, another manned platform. It was a much more modest program, but was cancelled a few years later. Now ARH is being succeeded by the Armed Scout Helicopter, another manned vehicle, which is hanging by a thread. It may be that the Army decides to upgrade its existing fleet of 25 year old Kiowa Warriors instead, keeping them around for another couple decades, while also buying more UAVs. I think most observers would say that the age of scout helicopters should be drawing to a close, but the Army isn’t there yet.
Interesting fact: over the last decade, about a third of the Army’s R&D funds have been spent on programs that have been cancelled. Comanche and ARH are just two examples of several of large Army development programs that have tanked.
Everybody disses on the poor Aardvark. The TFX had a lot more wrong with the idea than the JSF has. The idea of the TFX being a single airframe to meet both Air Force and Navy requirements was the brainchild of everyone’s favorite whiz-kid and Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, the man better known for his other brilliance in bring you Vietnam. What the services were looking for were polar opposites, the Air Force wanted a low altitude penetration bomber capable of supersonic flight at low altitude using terrain following radar while the Navy was looking for a high altitude, high speed interceptor carrying very long range air to air missiles, which it eventually got in the F-14 once they dropped out of the TFX/F-111 program. Worse, a lot of this was new technology being put into an operational aircraft for the first time: terrain following radar for low altitude penetration, the AIM-54 Phoenix and AN/AWG-9 radar for the simultaneous engagement of 6 aerial targets at the unprecedented range of 100 miles, and variable-sweep wings.
Perhaps I’m biased as I’ve always liked the F-111, but the upshot of all my rambling is I disagree with calling the F-111 barely adequate. In spite of McNamara’s best efforts to create a complete flop, the F-111 emerged from the TFX program a very successful bomber, undeserving of the bad rap it sometimes gets. It had an extremely low loss rate in Vietnam, successfully carried out the longest range bombing run in history on Libya in Operation El Dorado Canyon, and dropped 80% of the laser guided bombs used in Desert Storm.
Then again I know I’m biased, as the F-111 was the backbone of the RAAF’s ground attack ability for a lot of years. We only just recently retired our fleet in fact, and we had kept them flying the last few years prior, thanks to robbing the boneyard in Arizona of airframes for spare parts.
The fact is the F-111 is far superior to the aircraft we have now (F-18’s & Super Hornets now) in its role. So we’ve given up a good long range strike capability for more versatile aircraft.
All the informed speculation I have seen says that was no more than a Blackhawk with some modifications to the outside to make it more stealthy. Not at all the same thing as what is being talked about here. Totally different job and not really a big change from the MH-60.