Aerial pick-ups; the ten tonners: offering an attractive combination of usefulness and affordability, utility helicopters of around ten tonnes are the aviation equivalent of the pick-up truck. Such aircraft are operated in large numbers, and several outstanding designs are competing for new and replacement orders.

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Rotary-wing

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Aerial pick-ups; the ten tonners: offering an attractive combination of usefulness and affordability, utility helicopters of around ten tonnes are the aviation equivalent of the pick-up truck. Such aircraft are operated in large numbers, and several outstanding designs are competing for new and replacement orders.

The utility helicopter came of age in the late 1960s when the US Army's in-theatre Bell UH-1D/H 'Huey' fleet amounted to approximately 2400 of the 4000 rotary-wing aircraft in Vietnam. The short-body UH-1B/C gunship added around 1200 to the deployed total.

Between 1962 and 1964 the Huey (originally the HU-1A Iroquois) had replaced the Vertol H-21 'Flying Banana' as the standard US Army troop transport. Bell's relatively simple, easily transported two-blade helicopter made possible the service's new 'airmobile' operations, involving up to 250 aircraft in a single force-insertion. This form of warfare was developed to overcome the road transport problems (delays, mines and ambushes) that had defeated pre-1954 French Army efforts to control the countryside of what was the...

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