How Bell Helicopters Turned The HUEY Into The COBRA

about 60 years ago the first prototype of the ah1 took off on its Maiden flight the first helicopter ever to have been designed specifically for combat and six decades later new ah1 helicopters are still rolling off their production lines and into Frontline units all over the globe the Cobra set the standard for Attack Helicopters just as the Huey had set the standard for utility helicopters and today we're going to take a look at why this aircraft is so special anti-bell Engineers managed to take the humble uh-1 design and turn it into the greatest attack helicopter to ever fly this is the story of the ah1 Huey cobra you can deploy your own attack helicopters in conflict of Nations who have been kind enough to sponsor this video conflict of Nations is a free online PVP strategy game in which you choose a real country to lead in modern Global Warfare you'll fight up to 128 other players in real-time games that can take weeks to complete crafting your army from hundreds of different units tanks Jets helicopters or even nuclear submarines you can use diplomacy to forge alliances or use brute force to take your objectives using your strategy to wage epic battles and take over the world I love that moving your troops launching airstrikes or building infrastructure takes hours to accomplish in real time so it adds a much deeper level of strategy to the game you can play with the same account at both PC and mobile and by using the link in the description below you can get an exclusive gift 13 000 gold and one month premium subscription completely free this offer is only available for 30 days so make sure you don't miss out but anyway back to this Nick helicopter helicopters as a concept only started to appear on a scene in the late 1940s becoming a popular idea in the 50s after their huge success in the Korean War at this time however they were tiny fragile machines didn't have the engines powerful enough or flight characteristics stable enough to be used in anything but auxiliary rules if we fast forward to the early 1960s though the helicopter had become a hugely important tool in most modern military thinking largely due to the success of Bell's uh-1 Iroquois the turboshaft part Workhorse of the US Army I go into detail about the uh1 in a video I made earlier this year so assuming you've watched that already we can skip ahead of it by the mid-1960s America was hopelessly entangled in the Vietnam War and was deploying uh-1 helicopters as gunships strapping M60 machine guns 40 millimeter grenade launchers and 2.75 inch rocket pods to the Huey and using them to suppress the enemy as troop transport aircraft dropped off their own valuable cargo and this worked but even the newest uh-1c was struggling to keep up with the unarmed uh-1 DS carrying the troops armed huees could only reach 90 miles per hour whereas the Slicks could get up to 104 miles an hour this issue was even more obvious when the gunships were deployed alongside ch-47 Chinooks which could fly up to 50 miles per hour faster than their escorts the trips transports either had to slow down significantly or make the decision to abandon the gunships both of which resulted in much higher loss rates but a solution was already on the drawing board the advanced aerial fire support system or aaf SSS or double AF double s or whatever which began in August of 1964. initially the plan was for an interim solution based on existing designs which was to be capable of reaching at least 140 knots while carrying a payload of around 1500 pounds this idea was rejected in favor of a completely new design with army top brass arguing that there was no point in trying to tie themselves to an inferior weapon system they wanted a new state-of-the-art helicopter and so aaf SS was born the program would be narrowed to two designs by 1965. the Sikorsky s66 and the Lockheed cl840 the Lockheed design officially designated the ah-56a Cheyenne would end up winning the competition and would first fly in 1967 but the Cheyenne as you can tell was an incredibly complex design and while hugely impressive was played with cost increases accidents and Technical delays these issues eventually led to the program's cancellation in 1972 but far before this it had become clear that the Cheyenne was not going to be ready soon enough to keep up with the Army's needs in Southeast Asia and in 1965 while the aaf SS program was still in progress the Army admitted that an interim solution would indeed be required and so the search commenced they returned with five designs the Kaman uh-2 the Sikorsky s61 the piaseki 16 inch a gunship variant of the Chinook and the bell model 209 all of these were based on existing helicopters but unlike the other competitors Bell had been working on their design for the best part of seven years as early as 1958 Bell Helicopter had been working on combat helicopter designs first adapting the model 204 to serve as a combat Recon aircraft known as the d-245 they received little to no support for this project however as this was before America entered Vietnam and realized the need for such a design the company continued to plug away at the d-245 project at its own expense presenting the d-255 Iroquois warrior in June 1962. as the name suggested the d-255 used components of the uh1 Iroquois and had a number of innovative features that would later appear on the Cobra such as the extended aerodynamic fuselage tandem cockpit and stub wings as well as the forward machine gun turret the d255 was probably the world's first true combat helicopter and later versions would see the stepped tandem cockpit replaced with a one-piece design the d-255 was only a mock-up and would never fly it was impressive enough to Warrant more work and Bell would soon expand a low-cost test bed for the attack helicopter concept testing as many aspects of the d245 and d255 as possible just on a smaller scale the result was this the model 207 this aircraft based on the model 47 was also then known as the oh-13x Sue Scout it kept the landing skids Central fuselage tail boom and tail rotor of the model 47 while using the rotor and power plant of the military oh13s unlike the model 47 or the oh-13s the suicide had the tandem cockpit aerodynamicuselage stubby wings and Chin turret of the d255 and was the first of Bell's combat helicopter designs to actually fly on the 27th of June 1963. for the next 16 months the aircraft will be tested extensively logging a total of 304 R's in the air and being flown by 340 Pilots it was a huge success ing done on the model 207 by the 11th Air Assault division concluded that a similar helicopter should be developed but with a larger payload on a turbo shaft power plant but this was going to be expensive at that time there was still no requirement however Bell was receiving detailed reports from its technical Representatives about the escalating war in Vietnam and they became convinced that the U.S military would soon realize the need for a combat helicopter and they wanted to be prepared on the 16th of December 1964 work began on the interim combat helicopter naturally it was to be based off the uh-1 in order to reduce cost and development time Bell also embraced the idea of offering the new aircraft as a variant of the Huey easing the purchase an introduction into Army service construction began in March 1965 aiming for an October 1st made in flight so that they could demonstrate the new helicopter to the bush board on November the 1st at the very latest work was done in secrecy with a new work area being constructed known as The Green Room in a far away Hangar and only a select few given access the room would often be referred to as the steam room by those who worked inside it as it got almost unbearably hot during the summer months anyway on the 3rd of September 1965 the model 209 was ruled out of the factory and revealed to the public bearing the Civil registration n209-j n209j first took to the skies four days later reaching a top speed of 104 miles per hour a day after that 184 miles per hour a day after that before breaking 200 miles per hour on the 25th safe to say this machine will have no problem keeping up the model 209 was largely an amalgamation of all the projects Bell had worked on before the uh-1 the d-245 d-255 and the model 207 it was almost unbelievably sleek and aerodynamic for a helicopter with recessed rivets flush mounted antenna fiberglass fairings around the swash plate and even retractable Landing skids despite looking nothing like the uh-1 especially from the front the model 209 used the tail rotor transmission and repulsion system of the C model Huey the Lycoming t53l11 in fact Bell claimed that 85 percent of the mechanical components used were identical to those used on the uh-1c making the design much more attractive from a spare parts and maintenance point of view the narrow fuselage had a two-man tandem cockpit with a pilot in the rear and the gunner in the front operating his m134 machine gun turret which was paired with his own computer that helped compensate for Target deviations and calculated lead angles the 8 000 rounds of ammunition for the 7.62 millimeter Gatling gun were stored in these boxes under the cockpit which folded out quite nicely for access you can see in this photo the ammo storage as well as the flaps for the retractable Landing skids and the Chevrolet brand cockpit strut that they sourced from a Chevy dealer in Fort Worth the pilot could fire the turret as well but only in the locked forward position his main Armament was mounted on the stubby Wings either side of the aircraft mounting rocket or machine gun pods These Wings also provided lift relieving stress on the rotor and allowing for a much more maneuverable aircraft experience in Vietnam had shown that helicopters get shot an awful lot Often by 7.62 millimeter runs to address this Bell spent considerable effort armoring areas of the aircraft in order to protect the pilots in other key areas the bucket seats were made of a quarter inch steel the Gunner had a nose plate and a 1.125 inch armored windscreen the hydraulic system engine compressor and fuel control system all had armored plates and the fuel tanks were armored as well as being self-sealing and as it was the 1960s the crew of course got their own ashtrays and November 1965 and 209j was shipped to Edwards AFB for testing against the other interim helicopter designs and by March 1966 it was abundantly clear the model 209 was a superior aircraft however it did take until April 1967 for Bell to get the 23 million dollar contract for the first 112 aircraft including two pre-production models n209j would fly on serving as a test bed for modifications on weapon loadouts until 1971 and going on a tour to showcase the exciting new design to the world bizarrely during these demonstrations the Gunner's control stick mounted the taxidermied head of a king cobra as a marketing gag with a head inexplicably getting lost during a display in Munich in 1967. but we're getting ahead of ourselves when the aircraft won the contract it was still only known as model 209 it was even meant to be adopted as the uh-1h to further hit home I was simply another variant of the Huey but in May 1966 it was changed the ah1g attack helicopter 1. the pre-production models were given the designation yah1g and the first took off on October 15 1966 undergoing rigorous testing at Fort Hood in May 1967 the first production aircraft began to leave the battle Factory boasting a number of modifications compared to n2o9j the most obvious is the lack of retractable Landing skids after a lot of testing it was discovered that the complex expensive but very attractive retractable skids only gave a speed increase of around 3 miles an hour and the engineers knew that in combat conditions fixed skids were a much more reliable option and so they were removed the production ah1gs also mounted a larger diameter xm64 machine gun turret this turret still only had one Gatling gun but a later installation of the m28 turret of the same diameter allowed for the installation of two miniguns two 40 millimeter grenade launchers or a combination of the two effectively doubling the Gunner's Firepower in addition the wingspan was increased slightly the wings themselves were reinforced the seats were replaced with spaced armor versions and the more powerful l-13 power plant was fitted boasting 300 extra horsepower the last significant change Was the removal of the bulletproof windshield after calculations revealed that the hit chance was less than four percent but you know try telling that to the poor Gunner after these first two contracts were fulfilled the military quickly placed another and by March 1967 contracts were in place for 530 aircraft safe to say that the ah1g was here to stay and I was only getting started ah1g is a long name though don't you think helicopters in the US Army usually got named after Native American tribes the Sioux the Chickasaw the Chinook Etc but this convention wasn't used for the ah1 the Army was in a legal dispute with Piper who used the same names for their own aircraft and even though the uh-1 was technically the Iroquois nobody in the US used the name anyway and so adapting a nickname that was already in use for machine gun wielding gunships they called the new aircraft the ah1g Huey cobra of course this is just the beginning of the Cobra story but is unfortunately the end of this video in the next installments I'll take you through the Cobra service in Vietnam and guide you through the hundreds of variants of the helicopter stretching from the n209j back in 1965 all the way up to the ah1z model still flying today clearly there's a lot to unpack between these two thanks again the conflict of Nations for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel to refresh your memory conflict of Nations is a free online PVP strategy game with a focus on Modern Global Warfare in which you choose your own strategy to take over the world click that link in the description for exclusive free gift package choose your country and fight your way to Victory thank you so much for watching please do consider subscribing if you've enjoyed and of course a huge thank you to my patreon supporters and my friends on Discord I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Red Wrench Films

Views: 339,174

Keywords: Huey, Helicopter, Uh-1, Hu-1, Uh-1b, uh-1c, Uh-1d, uh-1h, uh-1N, uh-1Y, iroquois

Id: _jLnfuoifqk

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023