Why Britain Tore The American Engines Out Of Its Apaches And Built The Most Powerful In The World

[00:00:00]Yovil, Somerset. The 20th of July, 2000.

[00:00:03]Low cloud sitting on the Westland airfield. A wet morning in the middle of an English summer. The light so flat it takes the color out of everything. On the apron sits an attack helicopter that has never flown. It wears British Army green. It carries a British Army serial ZJ172.

[00:00:19]And to any American who has spent a career around this design, it looks precisely like the aircraft he already knows. In the front seat is a man who knows it better than almost anyone alive. Walt Jones is a Boeing production test pilot. His working life has been spent at Mesa, Arizona, where these machines come out of a factory in the desert heat built for the United States Army in numbers. He has taken new airframes off the ground more times than he could usefully count. Behind him in the rear cockpit, sits Richard Morton, chief test pilot for GKN Westland. The start sequence begins, and this is where the morning stops being routine. The note is wrong. The spool is wrong. The pitch of the sound as it climbs and settles is wrong. He has heard this aircraft wake up hundreds of times, and it has never sounded like this. Then they lift and the machine goes up in a way that does not match the numbers in his head. He can explain part of it. New airframe, light fuel state, cool damp air off the Somerset levels, a rotor system that has not yet worn in. All of that is true, and none of it accounts for the difference. The difference is bolted either side of the rotor mast.

[00:01:24]two engines and they were not built in Lynn, Massachusetts. They were built in Bristol and in Bordes. This is not a story about a helicopter Britain bought from America. This is a story about what a country is actually buying when it refuses to buy a finished thing. A machine is not measured by what it can do. It is measured by what it can still do on the worst day of the year. Part one. Before we reach the reason Britain changed the engines, we owe something to the people who said it should not. By the middle of the 1990s, the Apache was not a promising design. It was a proven one. It had opened the air campaign in Iraq in 1991, and it had done what the brochers claimed, which is rarer than the brochers admit. More than 800 had been built. The line at Mesa was mature.

[00:02:04]The tooling was paid for, and the engine was one of the great quiet successes of postwar aviation. The General Electric T700 was shared with the Blackhawk.

[00:02:13]Thousands were in service. Every failure mode it had was cataloged. Every fix already engineered, every spare already sitting in a depot on four continents.

[00:02:22]All of it underwritten by the United States Army and available to anyone who bought the aircraft as it came. Buy it as built and you inherit the price. Buy it as built and you inherit the reliability data. Buy it as built and you inherit every correction somebody else has already paid for. That was the prevailing assumption. And it was not lazy. It was the accumulated wisdom of 40 years of allied procurement. Britain went shopping anyway. Invitations to bid went out in 1993. The Euroopter Tiger came forward with British Aerospace. An upgraded Cobra came forward with GEC Maronei, offered as Cobra Venom. The Italian A129 was in the running, and the Apache came forward through Westland.

[00:03:02]Only one of those had been to war. On the 13th of July 1995, the Defense Secretary, Michael Patillo, announced the winner. He said the competition had been conducted with quote utmost rigor and objectivity end quote. That is from the defense press of the day. The deal was reported at around 2.5 billion and each losing bidder wrote off roughly £25 million in campaign costs but Britain had not bought Apaches. Britain had bought the right to build them. The contract went to GKN Westland on the 1st of April 1996.

[00:03:34]67 aircraft, eight of them assembled by Boeing at Mesa. The other 59 put together at Yovil in Somerset from American Kits and announced alongside it the decision that this script exists for. The American engine was coming out.

[00:03:46]The arithmetic made sober people wse.

[00:03:48]The General Electric T700G701C fitted to the American Apache produced roughly 1,890 shaft horsepower at takeoff. The Anglo French engine Britain chose instead produced roughly 2,100, 210 more per side. Then the Sting, the gearbox stayed American. The transmission that converts engine power into rotor power was unchanged, and it would not pass a great deal beyond the American figure in any case, which meant on paper that the British taxpayer was funding a development and certification bill for horsepower. The aircraft could not physically put through its own drive shaft. The objections came from serious people. John Weston, then chairman of British Aerospace Defense, warned that the choice would make the United Kingdom, quote, a less attractive partner as consolidation within the industry continues, end quote. The Treasury did what the Treasury does, and the requirement shrank from an early ambition of around 90 aircraft to 67. In 1998, the Longbow radar was showing weight and data transfer trouble. In 1999, American Apaches were grounded over a tailrotor problem during the Balkan's deployment. And in August of that year, a national newspaper ran a front page saying the whole British program was about to be axed. None of that was stupid. Their sums were correct. The gearbox limit was real, and it is still real today. The reasoning was sound inside its own frame. The frame was the problem. They were measuring the wrong quantity. The model worked. It worked right up until the aircraft went somewhere hot. Part two.

[00:05:15]The machine was designated Apache AH Mark1. The company called it the W Ah64.

[00:05:22]67 were built, 59 of them at Yovil, and everything that made it different from an American Apache followed from one decision taken at the top. The engine was the Rolls-Royce Turba RTM 322. It came out of a 50/50 joint venture between Rolls-Royce in Britain and Turba in France with development costs of roughly 100 million split down the middle. It had not been designed for a gunship at all. It was designed for the EH101, the aircraft the Royal Navy would come to call Merlin, and it first flew in one on the 6th of June, 1993. It went on to power the NH90 as well. Here is the thing the horsepower argument missed. A gas turbine does not produce a fixed number. It produces whatever the air will allow it to produce. Hot air is thin air. High air is thin air. Put the two together, a summer afternoon in a mountain valley and an engine rated at a comfortable figure at sea level on a cold morning is delivering a great deal less than its data sheet. So the useful question is never what an engine makes on a test stand in England. The useful question is what it still has left when the day is against it. It was not about speed. It was not about a larger number in a brochure. It was about what remained. Everything else Britain bolted on made sense only because that margin existed. Every one of the 67 carried the longbow millimeter wave radar in a drum above the rotor mast and Britain was the first operator to fit it across an entire fleet. That is weight mounted high in exactly the place you least want weight when the air is thin. American crews in Afghanistan sometimes remove theirs to claw back performance. British crews did not have to. One British pilot told the Defense Press in January 2007 that he would feel naked flying without it. That same reporting in Flight International recorded that the British engines gave hot and high performance, superior to the Apaches of the United States Army in air temperatures up to 49° C and at altitudes up to 10,000 ft.

[00:07:13]The rest of the British specification followed the same logic. Folding main rotor blades so the aircraft would go below decks on a ship and inside a transport airplane hid the helicopter integrated defensive aid system cleared for service in July 2003. Tying radar warning, laser warning, missile approach warning and the chaff and flare dispensers into one system that would act before the crew asked it to. CRV7 rockets in place of the American Hydra Bowman secure radios so it could speak to the British army rather than to somebody else's anti-icing on the blades for arctic work. Then it went to Helmond 656 squadron of nine regiment Army Airore arrived in the summer of 2006 into ground temperatures that flatten a helicopter's performance chart and flew loaded with the radar still fitted out of landing sites that sat thousands of feet above the sea. The margin that the accountants had called waste was now the difference between a task accepted and a task declined. The American reaction for the record was not resentment. At the Mesa roll out, Boeing's Mike Sears, then president of military aircraft and missile systems, called it a great program for GKN Westland, for Boeing and the UK government. End quote. Richard Casease of GKN Westland thanked quote those involved from Loheed Martin, Boeing and GKN Westland helicopters who are delivering this key project both on time and on budget end quote. Two companies building the same aircraft two ways and shaking hands about it, what those crews did with it over Helmond would eventually change how three armies thought about a helicopter's power rating. But first, if this deep dive into British engineering is holding you, hit subscribe. It costs nothing and it helps the channel grow. Now, the record part three. Ask why Britain could do this at all, and you stop talking about helicopters and start talking about a country's industrial floor. There are perhaps four nations on Earth that can design, build, certify, and support a helicopter turbo shaft engine from a blank sheet. Britain is one of them, and has been since the war. The RTM 322 existed because Rolls-Royce and Turba agreed to pull a market neither could carry alone. And because there was an aircraft, the Merlin already committed to it. Yovil existed because Britain had decided repeatedly and expensively that it would keep one helicopter plant of its own. That is why the offset argument nearly sank the American bid before it won. The defense press of the time recorded that the industrial package only came right when Rolls-Royce and shorts came to prominence within it.

[00:09:34]Britain was not in the end buying 67 helicopters. Britain was buying the ability to go on building helicopters and the engine was the price of entry.

[00:09:42]The dividend arrived over Afghanistan.

[00:09:44]Between 2006 and April 2014, British Apaches flew 50,000 hours over that country. 50,000 hours in the worst combination of heat and altitude that any Apache operator has had to work in on a fleet of 67 airframes in a climate that punishes a turbine for every degree above standard. The fleet as a whole passed 100,000 flying hours in May 2011, roughly a third of that on operations.

[00:10:08]Now, put the original objection back on the table. The American engine produced roughly 1,890 shaft horsepower at takeoff. The British engine produced roughly 2,100. The gearbox capped what could reach the rotor at close to the American figure.

[00:10:23]And the critics were entirely right that the surplus could not all be used. Read that line again because the answer is inside it. The surplus was never meant to be used. The surplus was there so that the engine would still reach the gearbox limit on a day when the American engine could not. At 49 degrees, at 10,000 ft, nobody's making their sea level rating. Both engines fall. The one that starts higher lands in a better place. The cap was not the floor in the design. The cap was the target. And the whole argument was about which engine could still hit it in August. A machine is not measured by what it can do. It is measured by what it can still do on the worst day of the year. That is the difference between a specification and a margin. One sells an aircraft, the other brings it home. I should be honest about the numbers because the internet is not.

[00:11:09]You will see the British uplift quoted as 19%. Set the published takeoff ratings against one another and it is closer to 11. The 19% figure appears in secondary sources and I cannot trace it to a manufacturer's document. The hot and high advantage however is reported in the contemporary defense press and confirmed by the crews who flew it and that is the claim that actually matters.

[00:11:30]And there is a structural reason the Americans could not simply copy it. They had more than 800 Apaches supported by a single engine type, a single spares pipeline, a single training system, and a single overhaul industry. Re-engineing 67 aircraft is a program. Re-engineing 800 is a national undertaking with no obvious payback. That is not a failure of American imagination. That is arithmetic of a different kind, and it is the reason a small fleet can sometimes be the more agile thing to own. If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served with the army airore, or worked at Yoville or at Bristol on the engine itself, I would be grateful to read their name and their trade below. A program like this is remembered through its people, or it is not remembered at all. Part four. Here is the moment the assumption was proven wrong, and it did not happen in a valley in Helmond. It happened at sea. In the spring of 2011, five Apaches of 656 Squadron embarked in HMS Ocean for operations over Libya. The folding blades, which had looked like a yovil indulgence 15 years earlier, were the reason the aircraft could be struck down below decks at all. On the 17th of May, 2011, they ran a live firing off Gibraltar to prove the ship and the aircraft together. Nine Hellfire missiles, 550 rounds of cannon, and the Ministry of Defense recorded 100% strike rate. Then they went to work. 22 missions between June and October of 2011. More than 100 targets struck, 99 Hellfire missiles and 4,800 rounds of 30 mm cannon expended. It was the first time British Apaches had fought from a ship. Major McNeel, commanding four regiment Army Airore, described the change of character plainly. In Afghanistan, he said the aircraft were used in a reactionary way, supporting the men on the ground over Libya. They were part of deliberate targeted operations and that, in his words, was quote demanding flying end. 4 years earlier, the machine had already been asked to do something nobody had designed it for. On the 15th of January 2007, an assault on Jug room Fort in Helmond went wrong, and Lance Corporal Matthew Ford of the Royal Marines was left inside the objective. Two Apaches of 656 Squadron went back for him, and four Royal Marines rode in on the outside of the aircraft, strapped to the stub wings because there was nowhere else to put them. Ford was recovered. He did not survive his wounds. That is a maneuver that appears in no flight manual at a weight and a drag configuration nobody had certified in a valley at altitude in an aircraft that had to be able to hover with four men hanging off it. Two of the pilots received the military cross. Among them warrant officer class one Ed Macy. Two received the distinguished flying cross.

[00:14:05]Among them Captain Tommo Mali. They were right that the gearbox capped the power.

[00:14:09]They were right that a license build at Yoville cost more than a purchase from Mesa. They were right that the British engine bought numbers the drive shaft would never pass. What they were wrong about was the question. They had asked what the aircraft could produce. The answer that mattered was what the aircraft could still produce. Loaded, hot, high with a radar on the mast and men on the wings. Part five. So what had Walt Jones actually heard on a gray morning at Yovil in the summer of 2000?

[00:14:35]He had heard a country deciding that an aircraft is not a set of numbers you accept from somebody else. That is the whole argument. and it took Helmond and Libya to settle it. Now, the honest part, because the ledger does not balance neatly, the National Audit Office reported on the program on the 28th of October, 2002. It found the aircraft themselves arriving broadly to time and cost against a3 billion pound prime contract with Westland helicopters. It also found that the training arrangement had slipped badly, chiefly over the pilot full mission simulator, and that the full Apache pilot conversion program would not now finish until February 2007, nearly 3 years late. Aircraft had to be stored while the crews caught up at an additional cost of £6 million. 19 sat at RAF Shawbury by June 2004, and the last of them did not leave storage until the closing weeks of 2006.

[00:15:24]The public accounts committee looking at the worst case warned that as many as 40 aircraft worth over 1.2 billion might end up in store. And at the height of the Afghan commitment in November 2008, only around 20 of the 67 were available for combat operations because the spares and maintenance chain had not been bought at the same scale as the aircraft. Britain bought a superb engine and then for several years could not put enough trained crews in front of it.

[00:15:49]That is a real failure and it belongs in the record next to the 50,000 hours. The critics measured power on a test stand at sea level on a cold morning. Britain measured what was left at 10,000 ft in August. Their metric was output. The British metric was reserve. And then having won the argument, Britain gave the engine back. On the 11th of July 2016, the Ministry of Defense confirmed the purchase of 50 AH64E Apaches from Boeing, a foreign military sale worth 2.3 billion, forecast on the British side at 1.793 billion against an approval of 1.999 billion. They're largely remanufactured at Mesa and they run the General Electric T7000 GE701D.

[00:16:34]It was the first off-the-shelf purchase of a General Electric engine by the Ministry of Defense. The Apache AH Mark1 was retired on the 25th of March, 2024 with a fly past across the United Kingdom. Read that sequence again before you call it a defeat. The reasons given for going back to the American engine were a global spares chain and the ability to share forward arming and refueling points with allies, something the older aircraft made difficult.

[00:16:59]Britain did not decide the RTM 322 had been a mistake. Britain decided that the next war looked less like a lone national fleet in a hot valley and more like a coalition sharing fuel bowsers on somebody else's airfield. It was not a retreat. It was not an admission. It was the same institution asking a different question 20 years on and having the industrial confidence to answer it either way. Remember what that engine bought and who spent it. Richard Morton and Walt Jones, a British test pilot and an American one lifting ZJ172 off a Somerset runway together. The engineers at Bristol and at boards who agreed to share a market so that a design could exist at all. the line at Yovil, Tom Ali and Ed Macy and the crews of 656 squadron who found out what the margin was worth in a valley in Helmond, Mc Neville and the men who took the aircraft to sea and Lance Corporal Matthew Ford whom they went back for one admission plainly. The flight, the date, the aircraft and the two men in that cockpit are on the record. What Walt Jones heard and thought as the engines lit is my reconstruction drawn from what those engines were and what they went on to do. Everything after it is documented. A machine is not measured by what it can do. It is measured by what it can still do on the worst day of the year. Britain worked that out in 1995, paid for it for 20 years, and was proved right somewhere over Helmond at 49°.