The Army's new Apache attack helicopter is a fine aircraft that's taken a bum rap, say spokesmen for McDonnell Douglas, which built the $10 million chopper that the General Accounting Office says didn't work in Panama's high humidity during last fall's invasion.
Utah's Army National Guard 1st Battalion, 211th Aviation Regiment, flew seven of the controversial high-tech aircraft in a demonstration Saturday morning at Salt Lake Airport No. 2 for Armed Forces Day.The Utah Guard unit has been assigned 18 of the AH-64 helicopters, and unit personnel have been training for a year and a half to operate them. The unit is scheduled to join the ranks of combat-ready Apache battalions by the end of September 1991, said Lt. Col. Robert Holt, the battalion's commander.
The GAO has recommended that the Army not purchase the remaining 132 of the 807 Apaches it has contracted to buy from McDonnell Douglas and instead use the $1.49 billion already appropriated to fix the Apaches it already has.
But Philip A. Mooney, McDonnell Douglas department manager for U.S. government/business development, told the Deseret News the GAO report has not persuaded the Army to change its plans.
"The Army has come on line very strong about the findings of the GAO report," Mooney said, "because they're out of date and they're inaccurate and they're based on very little fact."
Referring to reports that Panama's humidity caused the Apache's fancy electronics to fail last fall, George K. Philips, manager of McDonnell Douglas U.S. Business Development, AH-64 Division, said the reports were exaggerated.
"There was absolutely no instance where radios were dried in ovens," he said, and none of the humidity-related problems caused the delay of any assigned mission.
Pilots like the Apache, Mooney and Philips said, because its systems are highly redundant, so there's a backup if almost anything goes wrong, including the loss of an engine. And the Apache is remarkably crash-resistant, they said.
During a training flight in California two weeks ago, Philips said, "Two Apaches flew into each other, caught on fire, crashed, and all four pilots survived. . . . Show me any other aircraft where you can have midairs like that and people survive."