It’s a matter of time before it happens to all of them. Helicopters require a ton of periodic maintenance, adjustments and upkeep. The Taliban don’t have the culture, knowledge or access to parts to keep those air worthy.
Parts inside of the transmission alone, which have manufacturing tolerances in the thousandths and up, are only good for a couple thousand hours of run time at most.
Some parts for these machines are made, at least in the US, on machines that could be one of less than 3 in existence. They’re that specialized of parts, costing upwards of $750k+ per part. I’m sure they’ll be able to source knock offs from other countries (China I’m sure has the means and probably blueprints), but they won’t be within the tolerances, and idk how long the Taliban can shell out almost a million dollars per part for each helicopter.
Source: have family in the industry of machining helicopter parts for the government.
china russia and others are able to manufacture and maintain military helicopters.
just dont see why they would ever do business with the taliban?
1,000s of hours seems like a lot to me. I’ve had my riding mower for a couple of years and it’s only got like 37 hours on it.
And those helicopters could probably mow a quarter acre of lawn in only a couple seconds. 1000 helicopter hours is like 500,000 acres of mowed lawns or something, which seems like way more mowing than Afghanistan needs.
Yeah I get that, someone else linked a Blackhawk helicopter used for sale in this thread for a couple of million dollars, and it had only 3,600 hours on it, it was built in 1996.
Flying one also requires a ton of training, which this “pilot” obviously didn’t have.
The taliban took over a lot of American equipment when the pull out happened.
When the Military abandons equipment, they often sabotage it in some way so that it’s not useful to the enemy force.
Likely this helicopter had its tail rotor fucked with. It would have started and taken off okay in calm weather, but the moment the pilot attempted any kind of rotation, or got hit by a strong gust of wind, he was doomed.
This may have been the best pilot in the world, but once you’re in an out of control helicopter, there’s very little even the best pilot can do. It’s like if the stabilizer fell off a plane, there’s just not much you can do.
If the tail rotor was fucked with they wouldn’t have gotten that far off the ground. They would have started to spin as soon as their weight started to come off the ground, you have to be actively on the pedals at all times, not just when turning.
This was pilot error all the way.
Just a little more training and he could have found the ejection seat in time.
I know this is a joke, but helicopters don’t have ejection seats. If they did, they would just eject the pilot into the rotors and turn them into confetti.
They exist…just uncommon.
The Kamov Ka-50, which entered limited service with Russian forces in 1995, was the first production helicopter with an ejection seat. The system is similar to that of a conventional fixed-wing aircraft; however the main rotors are equipped with explosive bolts to jettison the blades moments before the seat is fired.
Crazy! I had no idea these existed. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.
I just remember an old airforce pilot telling me that he thought helicopter pilots had more balls than jet pilots, because if something goes wrong, helicopter pilots gotta go down with the ship. So, I figured that they didn’t exist at all.
Yeah I saw your reply above and was like wait I know there is at least one insane person whose made one of these.
That’s the joke…
Not necessarily.
True, they were probably better off selling these to China or Iran. Liquid assets and some degree of goodwill from regional powers will go a lot farther than whatever this was.
Not only was the piloting bad, so was the camera work. Holy fuck, keep the thing in the centre of the shot.
“I’ll bet I could fly that thing! How hard could it be?”
Narrator: it was very hard
Trying to fly is somehow not a blaphemy but pictures of people are.
Allah wasn’t very Akbar that day…
Or was he…?
I know nothing about helicopters, but can’t you autorotate down and increase your chances of not dying in a situation like this? I thought that’s what they were doing before they pitched forward and immediately died.
OK helicopter nerds, destroy me.
This idiot fucked up a perfectly operational helicopter in clear conditions at a safe altitude. There is exactly zero chance he could have safely managed an autorotation landing. And he wouldn’t need to anyway, autorotation helps if the engine fails, but it was clearly still under power.
I also know nothing about helicopters but I bet the answer is “yes… If you know how” with a follow up of “and they did not”
Yup, to be fair it is entirely possible the damaged part made maintaining the proper descent impossible.
To be fair it actually was Auto rotating down until the nose pitch down and it lost all the lift that it was generating and it wasn’t until then that it then pitched straight down and slammed right into the ground face first
Yeah that’s why I thought that was what they were doing, and then, instead, they abruptly decided to die.
I’m beginning to suspect they didn’t know that they were doing.
Cut him some slack, it was his first (and last) flight.
What clif said. Autorotation isn’t just something that happens. You still have to balance the helicopter (for lack of a better term in my head.) They did not.
The US sabotaged any equipment left behind. My guess is that they fixed that Black Hawk using parts off of multiple and some controls failed during their test.
Probably not. We only destroyed the classified stuff, there’s no reason to make them unsafe and endanger people when you can buy them used for a couple hundred thousand anyway.
My cousin was civilian DOD in charge of Bagram during the exit. Orders were to decommission anything useful and it was like Christmas for the Marines. Break everything was the rule. Everything.
Neat. It was widely publicized that that did not happen, they got the secret shit broken and then moved to making them junkpiles. Some got hammered to bits and others just got broke windshields and such.
So like office space but military. That sounds super fun.
A new UH-60L is around $10-$20 million depending on avionics and weapons, and I am under the impression that even an old 1990s A-variant would still cost upwards of $2 million.
One example: https://www.hangar67.com/aircraft-for-sale/turbine-helicopters/sikorsky/uh60a-black-hawk
A combat used, desert abandoned Blackhawk without necessary maintainance records can’t be sold in any country that cares about that which is pretty much everyone but poor middle eastern countries and Russia. That makes it a couple hundred thousand (essentially the scrap value) and we’ve been dumping these things across the planet for the last 30 years so there’s no shortage of crappy barely flight worthy ones popping about.
My guess is they bought the DCS Huey to learn how to fly out but refused to buy the collective. Keyboard and mouse to collective is very disorienting.
Haha, good point. I stand corrected. :)
Black Hawk Down 2
2 Down 2 Furious
Not really into war films but BHD is great as it’s more realistic in showing the USA getting spanked at the start and not just winning the whole time.
I’m not sure when they’ve won a war in recent times, if anyone can actually win at war.
The US “won” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rather quickly and handily, but they lost the subsequent peace. Turns out that’s the hard part.
Has anyone here read any persuasive articles or books explaining why Japan and Germany accepted and flourished under US occupation but Iraq and Afghanistan did not?
I’m not sure I agree with Afghanistan, they spend 20 years and billions of dollars and the second they left everything was undone and in fact worse than before.
Iraq was an illegal invasion based on lies, but I guess they did overwhelm the Iraqi government and army.
Afghanistan: the graveyard of empires
A great power can usually defeat it in the conventional military sense and take the cities, but no one can rule it long term. And many have tried. In that sense, Afghanistan is possibly the greatest blow to American exceptionalism ever.
The Chinese could probably do it using the totalitarian tactics they’re using on the Uighers, including gradual replacement of the population with ethnic Han Chinese. But…yuck, hopefully that’ll never happen.
Haha, they died terrified.
Maybe God is punishing them for being terrible.
Some kind of “careful, Icarus” thing?
Right. Wrong God. But still. Yes, the wrong wrong God, I get that. But still…
Uh … that’s the wrong god?
🤣
How did the Taliban get their hands on helicopters? I thought the US limited what armaments they gave the Afghan military to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands
There was a lot of leftover equipment due to the unexpected speed of the takeover. At the time there were discussions about destroying any remaining equipment but I believe they ended up figuring that things will naturally degrade and it isn’t like they have anyone trained in using/repairing American equipment. No classified info unlike Trump’s bathroom.
While that’s true, this helicopter was in ANA colors. It’s one of the ones we’d already given the Afghan Army.
the unexpected speed of the takeover
You mean to tell me Trump’s rout wasn’t SOP? ;-)
That was during the Biden administration
Who actually extended the timeline to get more stuff and people out.
A lot of maintenance is required for the equipment left behind. Sure, it looks good on their recruitment posters temporarily, but then 4 years later you get videos like this. Silly Taliban probably should have left some of those women studying engineering alone.
I think they didnt manage to evacuate all the materials from bases when they pulled out
We gave the ANA helicopters.
Free Blackhawks for the Taliban.
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