{"id":197293,"date":"2008-02-15T17:51:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T22:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/02\/15\/last-deliveries-of-bell-ah-1z-use-new-build-airframes\/"},"modified":"2008-02-15T17:51:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-15T22:51:00","slug":"last-deliveries-of-bell-ah-1z-use-new-build-airframes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/02\/15\/last-deliveries-of-bell-ah-1z-use-new-build-airframes\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Deliveries of Bell AH-1Z Use New Build Airframes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The US Marines have had two programs to upgrade their nearly Vietnam era helicopters.<\/p>\n<p>The upgrades are known as the UH-1Y and the AH-1Z.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to changes to avionics, these also involve upgrades to the engines and rotor systems.<\/p>\n<p>It now appears tatt the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flightglobal.com\/articles\/2008\/02\/15\/221550\/bell-ah-1z-upgrade-to-switch-to-new-airframes.html\">the final 40 deliveries will be completely new airframes<\/a>, as opposed to rebuilds.<\/p>\n<p>From a FMS (foreign military sales) perspective, this means that Bell will be able to sell new build AH-1 helicopters with 4 bladed rotors, and modern T700 engines.<\/p>\n<p>This is good news for Bell, which makes the AH-1 Cobra, and bad news for Boeing, which makes the AH-64 Apache, which is much larger and much more expensive to purchase and operate.<\/p>\n<p>Much of the utility in an attack helo is in its sensors and fire control systems, and the AH-1Z will be very close to the AH-64 in those capabilities, as well as in weapons load, though it will not carry the hideously expensive Longbow radar system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The US Marines have had two programs to upgrade their nearly Vietnam era helicopters. The upgrades are known as the UH-1Y and the AH-1Z. In addition to changes to avionics, these also involve upgrades to the engines and rotor systems. It now appears tatt the the final 40 deliveries will be completely new airframes, as &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,1008],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-defense-procurement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}