Tony R. Landis

Excellent book on a extremely interesting and advanced attack helicopter that did not see active military service and for its manufacturer (Lockheed) marked the end in development and manufacture of rotary craft.

Book goes through lots of details - it starts from early days of helicopter and development of armed helicopter in Vietnam War to bring us to the requirements for fast moving attack helicopter capable of escorting fast transport helicopters (this was surprise, I was not aware that show more Chinook was that fast) and loiter capability for longer time periods than modern jet warplanes could provide [than and now]. And here we end up with Lockheed's proposal that will soon become known as AH56A Cheyenne.

I wont go into much discussion, book contains all of the details. Cheyenne was truly revolutionary and would be more of a aircraft/helicopter hybrid than Osprey ever was if you ask me, but development took long, slowly crawled towards the end phase of Vietnam War which caused change in requirements (more toward anti tank role than general gunship), it used a lot of very advanced technology that caused this delay and finally price model was ...... weird (maybe precursor to modern day marathon development of F35 by the same company) ........ such that it managed to irritate US Army (noobs at the time when it comes to aircraft procurement on their own) which definitely did not help.

But everything aside I will never understand how you can develop advanced gunship helicopter, capable of incredible speeds on horizontal axis, great maneuvering, long loiter time over battlefield, huge amount of gun, grenade, unguided and guided rockets/missiles firepower (with more definitely coming up), swivel gunner position capable of directing majority of weapons in almost any position no matter the flight path (think Millenium Falcon swivel gun controls), helmet mounted automatic sighting and targeting ..........

And you do not provide means for all weather, day/night flight and combat, after all this time to make it more interesting for the Army. Are you telling me that affordable thermal imaging equipment of size to be installed on the vehicle was not available at the time? Please.

Book is full of technical details and information on this wonderful piece of technology that unfortunately met its premature end and ended any further Lockheed development when it comes to helicopters.

Highly recommended. show less

I've had this monograph sitting around forever and my first impression is that it's held up rather well all things considered. There is some gnashing of teeth that such an advanced machine was allowed to whither on the vine, and some bashing of Bob McNamara's procurement policies, but the authors do admit that by the time the U.S. Army were able to get this machine to work the requirements had changed; what was really wanted was a survivable gunship, as opposed to a high-speed escort. The show more other thought that comes to mind is that there is a need for a modern overall history of the helicopter gunship. show less