Airbus’ activation of the “Helicopter 0” test bed, the consolidation of three flying prototypes at Marignane, and preparations for an Albacete assembly line together indicate that the Tiger MkIII effort is entering its most decisive engineering period. If the transition from ground integration to flight testing proceeds as planned toward 2026, France and Spain will be positioned to field a more connected Tiger configuration aligned with emerging requirements for networked operations and crewed–uncrewed cooperation, while maintaining a joint industrial base to support the fleet through the next stage of its service life.
a) take a look at the Leonardo AW249 fenice, b) only Germany is substituting the Tiger with the Airbus light jokie-i-copter.
facepalm of course yeah that is a huge project to watch! Definitely at the top of the priority list for European defense and security interests to push that program forward!
I think it slipped my mind and merged with the Tiger in my head, idk but yes absolutely the AW249 is massively important I shouldn’t have missed it lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Helicopters_AW249_Fenice
The AW249 is a worthy response to the AH-64, it only falls short in not having quite the same payload weight capacity but it is similar enough.
Edit I am having trouble confirming the AW249 has a Longbow equivalent radar? If it doesn’t the AW249 is not anywhere near the same kind of aircraft as the AH-64 Apache. I expect the AW249 will have this capacity but it is an extremely important detail.
Doesn’t matter.
We agree on importance and that the Airbus H145M is a joke. If CAS is needed German Bundeswehr must hope for the Poles, Brits or Americans to be around.
Edit: I hope Germany opts for the Leonardo helo, too.
The thing that makes the H145M not a joke is the Lakota is the trainer helicopter for the Apache so Germany could always sidestep into the Apache if European attack helicopter programs fail, but I agree yes it is a light helicopter repurporsed as an attack helicopter because the people in charge won’t think they want an attack helicopter until they desperately need them.
I bet it will excel in light reconnaissance roles. The electronics and the instrument will be top notch.
Also, working from a stand off distance might work. But it is not hardened and the smallest AA or manpad will hunt it down.
https://www.heliopsmag.com/antares/articles/lakota-scouting-for-a-role/
Yeah the quote I pulled will age like milk and Germany will be inveitably forced to restart the process of acquiring actual attack helicopters in the future. Like yes… helicopters are useful when used like that but they are more useful when they are attack helicopters designed from the ground up through and through.
Not having a turret mounted direct fire weapon alone is potentially an alarming weakness to swarms of UAVs, if anything I would think militaries would desperately be trying to add turreted machine guns and lasers to helicopters not pursuing helicopters without them designed in from the get go…
Does the Fenice have the capability to mount a radar like the Longbow? I thought I saw they don’t have plans for that but I am having trouble confirming either way. If not that also seems absurdly shortsighted to me. The longbow radar is literally the most essential element of the recipe for a AH-64 or AH-1Z, I hope they don’t shoot themselves in the foot and not include a similar system on the AW249.
For anyone else who is curious this is a good review of the various different attack helicopter programs, I certainly needed it lol things are moving so fast.
https://euro-sd.com/2023/04/articles/30737/attack-helicopters-21st-century-combat-systems/
Also see this article for info on AW249
https://www.edrmagazine.eu/leonardo-unveils-the-aw249-fenice-the-new-italian-army-combat-helicopter
To be fair: they always said it is a stopgap solution. They had NATO obligations to meet and neither the budget nor the time was there to acquire something else. They took a look at the Apache and Cobra-family in the process and decided to go cheap.
Let’s see what the next round brings up.
Idk I guess I just see this from the perspective of US attack helicopter acquisition woes where the Air Force and Navy really didn’t want the Army to have an air platform for targetting and radar that could interface with ground units and coordinate targetting, reconnaissance, artillery fires and attack but could also organically operate with land armies out of unprepared conditions and be brought along with a ground army to be used as a launch platform for large amounts of guided and unguided munitions.
The way the politics of these things tend to bear out is ‘Air Forces’ and ‘Navies’ see the integration of such a fully capable fullstack warfighting asset in ‘Armies’ as a threat because it can do everything all the way from high level decisionmaking assigning targets to friendly assets over networked secure connections while observing with the Longbow radar down to physically flying up to a target and blowing it up after a friendly soldier on the ground essentially makes eye contact with the helicopter pilot, points and yells THERE BLOW THAT THING UP.
I think this is also why we have seen Ukraine so radically transform the battlefield with innovations in UAVs, these kinds of crossings between air power and land armies are always frought with politics and lots of “Hey that is my turf!” nonsense and ultimately it ends up very poorly positioning militaries to fight organic, dynamic conflicts where air support is critical, messy and not delineated cleanly between seperate institutions of a military fighting together. Ukraine bypassed that internal struggle and proceeded directly to making the best use of organic air assets working in close coordination with a land army as possible and the results are unarguably decisive.
My point is these kind of conditions tend to lead to militaries continually acquiring light helicopters while pretending they don’t need a heavy attack helicopter with advanced long range radar, targetting and data sharing capacity until they are forced to confront reality at which point they start the process of considering an attack helicopter that could fully encapsulate all those functions… and then back away because politically that is a perceived as a threat to the jobs of the Air Force and Navy the Army looking to acquire attack helicopters is connected to. Rinse repeat.
TL;DR Close Air Support is political as fuck along internal vectors of politics within military institutions.