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The present UH-1H Iroquois gunship kit was good in its day but nowadays hardly effective against the wide range of threats that inhabit the battlefield of the next decade.
A Weapons Fit for the Black Hawk
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A Weapons Fit for the New Utility Helicopter
This article is on a weapons fit for the new Utility Helicopter, the Sikorsky Black Hawk, being purchased for the Australian Army. This article is thus in three parts. The first part examines the pintle machine gun carried on the Utility Helicopter version; the second part is on a weapons fit for the Gunship version; and the final segment is on future developments if an expanded threat emerges.
The Pintle Machine Gun on the Utility Helicopter
The Black Hawk helicopter is a large target and the organic defensive fire from its pintle machine guns needs to be effective to reduce losses to enemy small arms fire during airmobile operations. The previous threat from light ground forces was principally small arms using 7. 62x43mm and 5. 56x45mm M193 ammunition, with some machine guns using heavier 7. 62mm ammunition.
However, the introduction of the 5. 56x45mm NATO round has completely upgraded the threat. The 5. 56mm NATO round has the same penetrative power as the current 7. 62x51mm round used by Australia’. This coupled with an increased scale of issue of machine guns using the new 5. 56mm NATO round means that helicopters now face twice as many belt-fed automatic weapons than previously experienced.
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