[Unified-mailman] More functional requirements and design ideas in the news!

[Charles P Coleman]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-022304copter_lat,1,2896519
.story?coll=la-home-headlines
After $8 Billion, Pentagon Shelves Helicopter
By Esther Schrader

2:50 PM PST, February 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — In a sign that the Pentagon is beginning to feel the budgetary
heat, the Army today canceled its Comanche helicopter program, bringing an
end to the development of a craft that had been 21 years and $8 billion
dollars in the making.

The cancellation is one of the biggest in Army history. And unlike the
landscape less than two years ago, when Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld ordered the Army's $11-billion Crusader artillery system canceled
over the protests of senior Army officials, this time the Army decided to
take the bullet.

The Army had little choice, senior officials of the service said. The RAH-66
Comanche, widely derided as a Cold War-era design with little utility in
today's battles, was uniquely vulnerable to an argument made repeatedly by
Rumsfeld: that bloated, big-ticket projects conceived during another era are
putting Pentagon efforts to modernize at risk.

When the Comanche was conceived in 1983, the Army was eager for a
lightweight, stealthy reconnaissance helicopter that would be able to move
ahead of large tank formations to gather and distribute intelligence and
attack enemy formations.

But since that day, the Pentagon has developed any number of aircraft that
can do all that — among them Blackhawk and Apache helicopters to attack, and
unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites to survey.

Meanwhile, the Comanche program encountered one technical setback after
another. It was overhauled six times as the cost per helicopter grew. And
two years ago, Rumsfeld announced that the program, originally slated to
cost $47 billion for 1,207 helicopters, would be cut in half. Under that
plan, 650 choppers were to be ready for use in 2009.

More:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/02/23/fina
ncial1829EST0336.DTL

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