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TIGER HELICOPTER ENTERS FULL PRODUCTION

On 6 March the Tiger even stole the headline in the Bild newspaper. "Must Scharping sacrifice the Tiger?" the newspaper asked in an article which mentioned a possible $1.6 billion (DM3.5 billion) of savings to be made. Where this story came from remains unclear. In any case it was quickly followed by denials. Defence Minister Scharping, Secretary of State for Armaments Stützle and Chief of Staff Kujat all protested in the Bundestag Defence Committee "that there is no truth in the reports".

Without the German-French combat helicopter Army Aviation might as well forget the vision they have pursued for years now of air mobility and combined weapon battlefield operations. A resolution to unilaterally withdraw from the programme would also cause considerable bad feeling between Paris and Bonn, quite apart from the impact on jobs at Eurocopter and its suppliers.

To this extent Frank Dorn, head of the Military Helicopters Division, was quite relaxed when FLUG REVUE paid a visit to Eurocopter in Marignane. Two years after award of the contract for production of the first batch of 160 aircraft, production is proceeding according to schedule and the technical risks associated with the remaining trials and system qualification are in his view under control.

One major milestone was the start of final assembly of UHT1, the first prototype of the German support helicopter Tiger 1, in Donauwörth. On 15 December of last year, the partly pre-equipped front and centre sections of the fuselage were joined together. A specially built rig which enables accurate work and provides good accessibility is used here. There is an identical rig in the French plant at Marignane. A policy decision was taken to avoid excessive automation as it is unlikely that more than twenty helicopters will be built per year.

The first Tiger will roll off the production line for its maiden flight in about one year. It will then initially be used for the remaining test tasks before being officially handed over to Army Aviation in December 2002. The French Aviation Légère de l'Armée de Terre (ALAT) will take delivery of their first Tiger in the middle of 2003. A pre-production HAP (Hélicoptère d'Appui et de Protection) version helicopter has already been built in Marignane using the production tooling and took off on 21 December 2000 for a 50-minute flight.

Eurocopter has optimised the airframe of the full production Tiger models with regard to weight, cost and working methods. For example, accessibility of equipment has been improved and the exhaust ducting has been modified to suppress thermal radiation. All the design documentation has in the meantime been transferred to the CATIA computer-aided development system, making life a lot easier for the engineers.

While ten years after the first flight on 27 April 1991 development of the baseline helicopter is virtually complete, work on the weapons systems and qualification of the equipment continues. Only in 1999 the sixth amendment to the main development contract was signed, reflecting another change in the customer requirements.

For example, the German Heeresflieger (Army Aviation) has changed its aircraft configuration over the years from a purely anti-tank helicopter to a multi-role helicopter (UHT) with unguided rockets and fixed gun. The helmet-mounted sight is now binocular, and a digital map has been added to the avionics suite. Some upgrades have already been effected during the development phase, for example, computer and displays (LCDs from Thales have replaced cathode-ray tubes). In addition, problems such as inadequate stabilisation of the mast-mounted sight and a thermal imaging camera that was not up to the job had to be resolved.

The five prototypes and the preproduction aircraft PS1 have now completed around 3,000 flying hours. Tasks completed in the last two years include the following:

• Qualification of the turreted 30mm GIAT AM-30781 gun on the HAC version. The gun turret can be swivelled within a range +/-90-o in azimuth and +/-33-o in elevation. Targets both on the ground and in the air can be acquired at over 2km, both with the sensors on the fuselage and with the helmet-mounted sight.
• A technical and operational evaluation by ALAT in July 2000. Some of the trials took place at the Cazaux Gunnery and Bombardment Centre on prototype PT2R2, in the course of which the gun was tried out in various configurations and the firing of air-to-air-missiles was demonstrated.
• Hot weather trials at the air forces Al Bateen air base in Abu Dhabi in September 1999. There PT3R flew a total of 21h 40min in 22 sorties. The cockpit air conditioning system, which can reduce the temperature from 70-oC to 25-oC in five minutes proved particularly impressive.
• Twelve development and qualification launches of the Hot anti-tank guided missile in June/July 1999. Four of these served to demonstrate target acquisition at the full range of over 3,900m by day and night. All the test missile launches carried out at the Meppen range were guided using the Tiger's thermal imager in the Osiris mast-mounted sight.

Ground-based trials have also been carried out. Last October two-blade and four-blade folding of the main rotor blades was demonstrated "at what may be a record speed" of six to seven minutes, despite a cross wind of almost 50 km/h.

In co-operation with Air Transport Wing 61 in Landsberg, loading trials of the UHT version were carried out on 27-28 October using a Transall. This entailed disassembling landing gear, sight and rotor head and also the tail rotor.

Finally, an auxiliary crane mounted on the engine deck was used to demonstrate how main components such as the rotor head, the sight, transmission and engines can be replaced in the field.

Still to go are testing of the electronic self-protection systems, the Doppler navigation system, the Eurogrid map reader and special radio sets for the French HAC version. Following completion of Stinger qualification, it will also be necessary to test the German UHT's rockets and gun in flight. This is scheduled to take place in the summer. The improved Alenia thermal imaging camera should then fly in the nose in October, as will the Osiris mast-mounted sight with an optimised vibration absorber.

Integration of the Trigat LR (Pars 3LR), a long-range anti-tank guided missile on which Germany is going it alone will constitute another critical point. Up to now only nine unguided Trigats have been fired from the Tiger. The first guided launch was performed from a Panther test platform on 7 December 2000. Flying forwards at around 85km/h, 100m off the ground, a tank target was hit at a distance of 2,600m exactly according to specification.

But all in all Eurocopter is confident of being able to complete qualification of all systems (including Eurogrid, GPS, crash recorder, IFF, track and balance, Saturn radio, EW) by the end of 2002. After a long development period the Tiger is thus poised to becoming operational.

From page 54 of FLUG REVUE 5/2001