Not at all. The first principal of armour is how much surface area is required to protect something. The Cheyenne’s single engine bay enabled it to be protected with far less armour than the Apache‘s two widely separated engine bays. The Cheyenne engine, servos and transmission were protected to be resistant to attrition loss from 23mm HEI (ie shot down, crash and burn). The Apache on the other hand would have required far more armour for such protection so the engine bays were separated by the bulkhead to be only resistant to forced landing from 23mm HEI fires (from one side only). On any professional vulnerability analysis the Apache engines are far deficient compared to the Cheyenne engine.
In vulnerability analysis the scale goes: mission abort, forced landing, attrition loss. An Apache hit by 23mm HEI on ONE engine bay has to mission abort but is not forced to land, hit on TWO sides and it is forced to land (autorotate). The Cheyenne hit by 23mm HEI on the engine bay (on both sides) can continue the mission.
The AH-64D has been shot down by an Iraqi farmer with a Brno rifle, shooting up the tail rotor.
Nope the Apache was actually lighter than the Cheyenne. The empty weight to horsepower ratio of the Cheyenne was 3.11 pounds per horsepower and the AH-64A was 3.37 pounds per horsepower. That 8% difference was not responsible for the 35% difference in maximum speed. The Cheyenne’s high performance was thanks to its rigid rotor head, lifting wings (enabling the rotor to be unloaded in forward flight) and propeller.
The ICS and AMCS offered different levels of performance. With the ICS (Improved [Flight] Control System, the AH-56 was only able to access about 3,925shp. The T64-GE-716 was producing 4,275shp and the AMCS (Advanced Mechanical Control System) would have allowed all of it to be accessible.
Just as a function of cruise/max speed, the AH-56 had an achieved max cruise of 158 knots and sprint of 194 knots Around 180 and 223mph. It cruised at the RAH-66s max, with the radar.
With the AMCS on the last FSD bird, essentially production ready, the Cheyenne could max at 215 knots and dive to 247 knots.
Try doing that in an Apache and it will come apart around you.
The Cheyenne was required to enter service to fight in Vietnam with all the helicopter vulnerability lessons of that war. All those single engine helicopters were not shot down because they had single engines. It was because their engines were not protected and they were slow and vulnerable to the Vietnamese gunners.
Lockheed were planning a twin engine Cheyenne for the US Marines. The twin engines were not for combat survivability but for improved engine reliability for extended over water operation. Actually it is quite easy to replace a single turbine with a twin pack turbine. Even if there is an increase in volume needed it would be marginal and there was nothing in the Cheyenne design that would have needed to be displaced by a larger engine bay.
Exhaust shrouding to counter the threat from IR homing missiles was something that was only emerging when the Cheyenne was cancelled. It could easily be fitted with such a shroud and the drag would not have significantly effected its performance. Because the Cheyenne’s engine bay was positioned closer to the rear of the aircraft (like the Cobra) such shrouding would be lighter and more effective than on an Apache.
Again, one or more of the last few Cheyennes had the sugar scoop diffuser, similar to that on the AH-1G and UH-1D, in Vietnam. Using captured SA-7s, the seeker really liked the hot gas plume being scattered down over the fuselage by the main rotor, compared to the single point source of the uncooled system. And the T53 was an 1,100shp engine...
Now add to this that the clearance between the boom and the main rotor disk is not exactly great on the AH-56 and fitting a plug type mixing suppressor might not be as easy as you think.
We would have lost a lot more fighters if they had flown slower! As to it being without much trouble... well I’m sure you would find plenty of German FLAK crews who would agree with you about the wonderful holiday they had in Normandy, the summer of ‘44. Such a flawed analogy is no replacement for a real vulnerability analysis. The Cheyenne’s speed, acceleration and deacceleration are significant not just for survivability but also for increased offensive effectiveness.
The issue is targeting. You don't want to get stuck pointing the nose at the threat. You want to lay the sensors over the side and pop up to take a quick image before denoting the target locations on a moving map and INS memory and passing the data onwards, to another platform or to higher headquarters, for collation and redistribution. You might think that this was the job of the RAH-66 Comanche. And you would be right.
But the AH-56 could do all of it, in 1970. AN/ARC-116 datalink, PMP moving map and the SGS link to the AN/ASN-98 INS via the CCC computer complex, storing ranged point indexes, thanks to the laser. Could the AH-64A do any of this?
Nope.
Could the D? Yes, but not over a secure gateway using microwave encrypted channels. It was still ATHS and AFATDS on an EPLRS network.
It was not until the Guardian that we had anything close. And that was because AMUST and MUM/T required satcomms to be secure at NLOS.
Not one of the Apaches have TFR. And while they may have a digital terrain database, they don't have a TRN navigator, to my knowledge. Though getting data on the APQ-118 pod and ICS linkage is hard, the AH-56, fifty years before AH-64E, appears to be doing coupled TFR.
Monsoon or Snow, that's more 'night all weather' than AAH every dreamed of achieving, thanks to the incredibly low contrast values and latency/smearing which PNVS was giving Apache crews at Illesheim, when the USAr stood up it's first Apache base in European weather. Everyone I've talked to said that pre-Arrowhead, the majority of Apache crews preferred flying goggles over HSF, due to the low quality sensor.
Accountants have had no troubles in dealing with baselining the effect on cost of inflation. It’s called indexation. Even factoring in inflation the cost of the Apache was much higher. Even factoring out the Hellfire system cost of the Apache was much higher (no one accounted cost of TOW development to the Cheyenne). Even without factoring in the cost of all the money spent by the US Army on Cobra development and production from 1972 (when it would have been superseded by Cheyenne) the cost of Apache was much higher. Even without factoring in the cost of Cheyenne development on top of the Apache program cost the cost of the Apache was much higher.
The US Army was sold a deal that AAH could be design to cost of $1.4 to $1.6 million per airframe, they ended out costing $2.5 million in 1972 then year dollars. This cost was just to build and didn't include the huge developmental cost. Overall the cost of developing Apache, building 800, combined with the cost of developing TOW Cobra, rebuilding 600 Cobras to TOW standard and building 350 new TOW Cobras was far, far more than it would have cost to build Cheyennes to fully equip the US Army's attack helicopter force.
The Cheyenne was a superior anti-tank platform and a superior close air support platform and a superior COIN platform to the AAH. It was also available in service 12 years earlier. Upgrading it through its lifetime would have been far more reasonable than developing a new helicopter. Hellfire, a twin pack turbine, digital systems, even the Longbow system would have been easier to add to Cheyenne that it would have been to develop an Apache.
Since it was a well understood aircraft owned by the US Army on the cusp of production in 1972 the Cheyenne had a highly realistic sticker price, since the AAH at this time was a commercially owned aircraft with a paper production plan its cost was as robust as its nature. Fact can’t compete with fiction in the minds of some. That was why the Cheyenne lost out to the Apache on cost and why people argue to this date it was a good decision.
The problem with the AH-56 was the lack of the AGM-64 or even, heck, the AGM-65. You could carry two, 200lb, Hornets per wing station or one, 460lb, Maverick _at the time_ the AH-56 was in development. The Army had no money after Vietnam and so wanted to kill hundreds of tanks with single battalions of attack helicopters, rather than develop divisions of MBT-70 to permanently station in Europe. This hope-is-not-a-strategy ideal was based on the experience of the UH-1B/C TOW killers in the Easter Offensive, up around Kontum, in...May, 1972 I think anyway? One month, 47 targets, 24 tanks. Most from 500-1,500ft AGL. And they lost one of the Hueys.
These aircraft were firing from the hover or very slow walking fire, which was all the XM-26 TSU could support. You try pulling that stunt in Europe and it won't matter what helicopter you're using: Indian, Huey or Sled. You're gonna be brutally hair-teeth-eyeballs separated from your oxygen addiction.
Now add to this that Big Army had already cut AH-56 buy numbers from 600 to 375 and so, automatically, prices are going to increase. And suddenly, you have a problem whereby you cannot sustain high inventory losses before you flatly run out of combat power. This is NOT an economic argument because it deals with force in-being correlates and it is simply cheaper to build the highest end T-64A (tank) to an inarguable advance-by-fire levels than it is to match it with ATGW from eggbeater helicopters doing stand and deliver SACLOS, acapella (no jamming, no SEAD, limited artillery coordination, JAWS/JAAT wouldn't happen for another 2-3 years).
ATGW vs. ADV is an LER based attritional math condition in that production rates will never scale in time to matter and your starting inventory will never rebuild before war end or nuclear release. This is the driving metric behind Forward Defense as the refusal to allow the threat to generate multiple salients and, without tactical nukes from before the start of combat operations, it's very hard to achieve with just air.
Sustained attrition in a Lanchestrian environment of two sandpapers grinding each other smooth always favors the larger starting force and that will always be the mechanized one.
Change this, to a salvo model, and you may have a chance. Because you're not necessarily in-contact at the point of attritional resolution. Which is a rough and tumble way of saying fire and forget from the helicopter that can come the furthest distance out from its MOB to conserve the force at both the frontal and combat turning/sustainment vulnerability locii.
TOW is a 550mph missile being tail chased by a 250mph launch platform through a 15-17 second TOF where the slightest contour chase is going to cause the missile to go stupid or safe out due to the extreme restrictions places on pitch, roll and G by the SACLOS tracker.
Try to actively evade and you're going to tear the tether or make the missile do St. Vitus' Dance and miss the target altogether. Hornet is television or 'EM' homing (??) and so it's going to edgelock the vidicon on whatever it is most precisely pointed at. This rewards a powered optronic with X12 mag since the Hornet seeker can boresight correlate on smaller contrasts than the human eye can differentiate. And having shot, 1-2 rounds at 3-4 miles, you can turn away. Not being physically connected to the airframe, the missile can be supersonic which is to say 700-800 knots as 2/3rds the TOF. Again this opens up the potential for a shoot-look-shoot evaluation as 2 complete salvo counts per pass. Which means you are hanging around a the contact line a lot less, inviting the counter intercept by those paired Fishbeds, Floggers or, eventually, Fullcrums with IRST and datalinks of their own.
If you are carrying two Hornet per pylon at 200lbs each, you have more guided shots than the TOW launcher, on two pylons, does. Hornet is day only and may not work well in European or SEA monsoonal weather. But frankly, neither will TOW, without thermal imaging which the baseline M65 TSU does not give you.
Most importantly those launch and leave AGM-64s speed the engagement cycle so that the Cheyenne can exploit its speed to quickly return to base and reload for another mission in another breakout area. Thus, they allow those 375 Cheyenne airframes to survive to generate more missions before attrition takes them as they pretend to meet the originally stated capacity need for 600 airframes in the USAr requirement.
Which brings us to the last dependent condition: you are purchasing a weapons system, not a bus vehicle. The bus part is fine, as stated, because it brings you into Germany from the Benelux or France, in all weathers. But the targeting sensors and munitions are the kill effectors which count.
And here, the AH-56 was competing with, not the AAH (AH-64) development effort but the AH-1P/Q/S/F which, between new build and re-manufacture of older G's, included some 1,300 aircraft. If you say the G was 471,000 dollars per unit, in 1966 (through 1973) and 1.5 million for the last Step III airframe in 1979, that's two million dollars for an aircraft which (sans FACTS and with few LAAT) was worth less, as an 'all weather, all hours' combat effector than the AH-56, _before_ you start paying for new build AH-64A as a mixed force (double the parts catalog, training costs and separate munitions) which began entering service, in Europe, in 1984. After a terrifying Window Of Vulnerability that lasted almost six years, wherein the GSFG and WARPAC held dual supremacy in both nuclear and conventional systems.
The Army bought 821 AH-64A at 17 million each, in 1984 dollars.
So... 2 X 1,300 AH-1F at 2 million each + 821 AH-64A at 17 million each = 13.97 billion plus 2.6 billion = 16.57 billion dollars, divide by 4 million per Cheyenne with an added 1.5 million per airframe as added costs to integrate ASE (APR-39, AVR-2, M130, ALQ-136, ALQ-157) and a flat fee of 2.57 billion to finish developing the AGM-64 rather than turn it into testbed for the AGM-114.
Say a total of 14 billion divided by 5.5 million per modernized Cheyenne. Equals 2,545 Cheyennes. Or, if you insist on a fixed number, 600 Cheyennes (the original desired total), at 23.33 million each.
Either way, by paying for the separate development of the AAH and the full production of double the number of Cheyennes for the AH-1, you are talking about a force which both contributes to the overall WOV because an AAFSS followon is twelve years late and three times the size because it is one third as capable.
Because of a lack of contributing systems. Like the Hornet.
(Hellfire A/B were nearly useless for a variety of scintillance, attenuation and autopilot problems...).
The AH-56 was likely undersold, it was certainly under-valued as a bird in hand deivery platform for a new generation weapons system which, while far from optimal, (period hybrid electronics) was itself necessary because the BGM-71 equipped TOW Cobra was, in no way, fit to fight, in Europe.
Having a minimum 150-200nm radius shortfall (FARP close to the FLOT) and possessd of a distinct, 2.02nm, engagement range disparity with 4-6nm SA-8/9; it was forced to be a hovering whackamole, Lanchestrian attrition, platform to increasingly competent (post-1973 Yom Kippur) Soviet mobile gun/missie ADV teamings.
The Snake was a good stand-in while they fixed Cheyenne in Vietnam, because it had power and drag advantages over the Huey to suppress enroute threats and/or dash ahead of the Slicks to prep the LZ. All from transit altitudes of 3,500-5,000ft, above the trashfire. As soon as the SA-7A showed up, that altitude block was totally denied to low-slow platforms. And at low level, a teetering rotor airframe is simply not mechanically safe nor agile enough to do the bob-and-weave defense, from NOE. You'll bump a mast and then you'll be dead, trying to dance between the rain drops.
The SA-7B was cooled and could see targets against a messy skyline and the SA-14 offered limited all aspect capabilities. I forget whether it was Gimlet or Grouse which intro'd the proximity fuse but they could nail you by flying over an intermediate obstacle and fusing on the rotor shimmer. And they were all produced in tens of thousands. With a couple gripstocks and two missiles each in the back of every BTR/BMP (see period propaganda photos with paired MPAD shooters literally standing air guard in the roof hatches of these vehicles), the notion of SACLOS warfare should have died, in 1972.
The hybrid compound gave you high speed altitude control at under 50ft AGL, independent of fuselage pitch as cyclic control rotor deflection angles, like a fixed wing aircraft. And this, linked to the ICS for truly coupled flight off a radalt or TFR, would have made the AH-56 much more run and gun capable in a popup vs. bobup profile. IF it could quickly lock-on to a target spotted by an initial, oblique, wingman pass and handed off by datalink to cue it's own ASN-98/CCC, pre--point-the-optics, kill chain.
That was the promise. No records now exist (that I have yet found) as to whether it actually worked.
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