Just what was the mystery US stealth-copter?
Details of the ‘stealth’ helicopter involved in the US operation to eliminate Osama bin Laden are beginning to be pieced together.
Jerry Gunner - 5-May-2011
UH-60 Black Hawk, similar to the S-70 airframe.May 6: The US military does not lack courage and audacity, and that coupled with superb technology frequently gives it the edge when it comes to offensive operations. The Americans do seem to be a bit unlucky though - it is only because of this bad luck that the world now knows about - or at least knows of the existence of - a secret ‘stealth’ helicopter that crashed during the course of Operation Geronimo to capture or kill bin Laden on May 2 in at his safe house in Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan..
First reports indicated that a military helicopter involved in the mission, reported as a Black Hawk, was destroyed by the Navy Seals involved after it suffered a technical malfunction. This seemed odd, because what’s so secret about an H-60, even one belonging to a special forces outfit like the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment?
Pakistan is of course a ‘friendly’ nation; surely the authorities there could be trusted with sensitive American technology? Then we saw the pictures - and we were none the wiser. All that remained in any way identifiable was what appeared to be the tail-rotor section of a helicopter - but not of any helicopter seen before. It appears that the ‘technical malfunction’ was caused when the helicopter was landed with its tail rotor protruding over the wall surrounding bin Laden’s villa, causing it to crash. Everything inside the compound had indeed been destroyed most efficiently.
In the images released so far there is nothing which even hints at the fact that it was a helicopter that was burned, but it would appear that the tail assembly had fallen over the other side of the wall and was spared the fiery destruction wrought on the rest of the airframe. What remained appears to be the rear horizontal forward-pointing stabilisers and a rotor hub assembly with fragments of what might be a fenestron-type tail. The stabilisers and vertical fin were painted in the high silver content paint effect used by certain F-16s and V-22s, which is said to be designed to reduce the infra-red signature, and there were no visible cracks between panels as they seemed to have been filled in with a putty type sealant.
These features might all have been designed to reduce the radar cross-section of the aircraft and make it harder to detect. One of the problems with making a helicopter stealthy is all the moving parts on the outside of the machine. Not just the rotors, but the aircraft skin itself is vibrating. These problems can to some degree be ameliorated, and in the now cancelled RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, many of them were. The wreckage photographed in Pakistan shows that the fenestron assembly of the crashed machine has a distinctive hub-cap type cover to its centre rotor boss, reminiscent of the Comanche, and there seemed to be at least five blades emanating from the hub. Adding blades to both main and tail rotors is one way of reducing noise and more powerful engines operating at lower power settings is another.
The Pentagon is unlikely to release images of the helicopter, so interested observers are obliged to make educated guesses. Given the size of the tail section, evident in Internet images, the most likely scenario would appear to be that an elite unit of the US military is operating a heavily modified Sikorsky S-70 airframe incorporating a completely re-designed tail-section, possibly using technology and construction techniques pioneered in the Comanche. Of course, if any of AFM’s readers can provide us with images of an intact example, we’d love to hear from you!
Filed Under Military Aviation News.
so there is nothing we have now to return except ashes 
by that time, indians will still cry "oh, how dare you copy it? how dare you fire on us using such clone the weapon? you are only allowed to kill me using US weapons!"
