Best Helicopter

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Thanks for the post. How did you like being a crew chief on the UH-60? I crewed and repaired them for 6 years. A wonderful aircraft.

 

[Sydhuey]

My absolute favorite helo, I'm mostly on S-92 now which has its faults but is a good chopper but the S-70(UH-60) is the bees knees, the Australian defence force don't run Crew Chief's like the US only the Chinook has a Flight Engineer on it the Black Hawks run 2 x loadmasters (glorified gunners with no technical abilities) bloody stupid idea , the helo breaks and you sit around waiting for the engineers to turn up , even something like a chip they can't look at -wait for an engineer to be flown in or drive in to do the work, just about all my flying on the Black Hawk was during testing , GPS trials , Mag 58 gun trials(M240) ( we ran the first Mag 58's on Black Hawks in 88 and most Black Hawk operators have adopted it as the standard MG fit much better gun than the M-60), Fast rope and rapelling, ESSS trials etc when they needed a techo on board not walk on ballast (loadmaster), also a few excersises etc when short of loadmasters.
The reason the Army don't run techos on the crews is when the Army took over all the Helo's in 1989 there was a shortage of techo's and they didn't want to loose anymore to aircrew so went with 2 x loadmasters, the Airforce was going to run 1 x Flight Engineer and 1 x loadmaster as on the Chinook, but because of the shortage they stuck with 2 x Loadmasters and no mechanical capability on board.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Yeah I think the idea of having a mechanic as a crew chief is much better. If we had some kind of problem I could atleast look at it (might need parts flown out or something, but I would at least have an idea). I have over 1600 hours crew time in the 60. We used M-60D's but have since converted to the 240s.