Page 30 - Australian Defence Magazine April 2023

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DEFENCE BUSINESS HEAD LAND CAPABILITY
APRIL 2023 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
The aircraft is but one part of that. We have commenced the training of technicians and aircrew in order to requalify our Special Operations Aviation workforce, so that as air- craft arrive, we’re growing the capability as quickly as we can. This means we can be capable of performing some of those Special Operations Aviation roles very early on, through the certification of personnel and the iterative ar- rival of aircraft, up to the declaration of the Special Opera- tions Aviation Task Unit.
ADM: Does the Army still have access to pilots with previ- ous experience on the previous Black Hawks?
MAJGEN KING: There are a number of pilots still serving and we have a number of reservist pilots with experience on that aircraft. We also have people who have had exchanges with US Army in a variety of roles who are familiar with the UH-60M Black Hawk as well.
LEFT:
Army argues one of the lessons from Ukraine is that heavy armour provides mass, firepower, protection and persistence
BELOW:
A US Army HIMARS system on display at the 2023 Avalon Airshow in March
ADM: What are Army’s intentions with respect to the US Future Vertical Lift Program?
MAJGEN KING: I mentioned earlier the benefits we’ve en- joyed from Chinook, about being US Army aligned. When we first bought the CH-47F Chinook we moved away from the D model and we were able to pick what I would describe as the sweet spot on the production line, a mature capabil- ity, a mature configuration and design to be in service and effectively be our lowest cost aircraft per flying hour in the Army aviation inventory.
They are the tenets that we learned from the disciplined approach of being US Army aligned and that’s the approach we carry through into both Apache and Black Hawk. If you extrapolate these capabilities out into the next decade with FVL, one of the benefits of those three platforms is, again, the support of US Army meaning that we don’t have to re- place any of those three platforms prematurely or pay exor- bitant amounts for obsolescence treatments, because they are already in sync with the drawdown and the path into future vertical lift of the US Army.
What it means is we don’t have to be an early adopter, or we find ourselves back on a developmental platform that of- fers reliability and affordability challenges, and instead we can leverage off US Army size and mass to pick the point where future vertical lift makes sense from a capability and price perspective.
“WE LEARNED GOOD LESSONS FROM OUR CH-47F CHINOOKS, WHICH ARE US ARMY CONFIGURATION ALIGNED”
So, through a variety of chan- nels we have personnel available and already trained.
ADM: Where will the new Apach- es be based?
MAJGEN KING: The Apaches are allocated to replace the Tiger in the 1st Aviation Regiment, which is in Darwin. I think Chief of
Army has been on record in relation to right sizing. How- ever, Army aviation would benefit from the consolidation and reducing what we call nodes. At the moment we operate Tiger across two nodes, in Oakey and in Darwin. We oper- ate MRH across a number of nodes and so I think as part of this work there will be a desire to collapse aviation capabili- ties down to as few geographic nodes as possible.
While we know little about the Defence Strategic Review (DSR), we anticipate there will be direction around structures, posture and organisation of Army similar to the announcement that Black Hawks would not be based in Townsville, but based in Sydney and Oakey.
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