German military kicks off heavy lift helicopter competition

You should.

You absolutely should spend time looking for things you expect not to find, because sometimes you will be wrong.

When you're maintaining an aircraft, a nuclear plant, or anything sufficiently complex or life critical, you should spend a certain amount of time looking for ghosts. You _will_ find them. Your model of an engineered system should include a finite rate of unknown bugs.

Very little. In this case, a single inspection (assuming all units were affected) over a period of 20 years would have prevented losses that more than compensate the effort of the added scrutiny.

Also, I like to be the first to know I'm wrong. If I make 100 aircraft and dedicate one to disassembly for study after a quarter of its estimated life, I'll be a .75% investment on better understanding my product. If De Havilland had done that, the stress on the square windows of the Comet would have been discovered before they started falling from the skies and we'd all be flying more beautiful planes.

I was shocked when I found out that, in more than 100 flights, nobody inspected the underside or the leading edges of the shuttle in orbit to check for damage incurred on lift off. They were pretty sure the only dangerous part of the flight was the re-entry.

You say a problem does not exist. You may have good reason to think it doesn't, and, yet, people die because it does.

On each plane it would not be reasonable, but on a few planes it could be done, and would detect defects like the one described above.

During the D maintenance, every part should be inspected. Things like fuel lines should be inspected much more regularly, ideally more often than it would take to rub through a fuel line.

But a visual inspection on a fuel line can be really difficult. I had a motorcycle with a leaky fuel line once, luckily it sprung a leak while warming up in my driveway and I turned off the bike before anything bad happened but it was almost impossible to tell where the leak was without pressurized fuel, the hose looked pristine without positive pressure to highlight the crack.

In race cars, they sometimes 'overpressure' the fuel line (above operating pressure but below max pressure) to check for leaks, I wonder if they ever do that routinely for aircraft.

I believe that B747 do get regularly tear down. They basically remove all the cabins, lots of the conduits and wires, remove the instruments in the cockpit, inspect hidden areas, and reassemble the whole thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_maintenance_checks#D_...

Stopping a major combined arms invasion from an easterly neighbor is the focus of all of Germany's big training exercises to this day. Instead of whatever the Heer says through its public affairs officers, look at what is actually being practiced and paid for with the Euros in the defense budget. It's not counterinsurgency, it's not disaster relief, it's training out of Wildflecken focused on stopping a theoretical invader from penetrating the Fulda Gap with tanks.

The German military in 2017 could probably not stop an invasion by Canada. NATO on the other hand, most certainly exists to deter Russian aggression.

To add to this comment, the majority of Finland's infantry fighting and transport vehicles that in use are still Soviet BMPs and MTLBs. Same applies to artillery and also all light machine guns are and probably will Russian PKMs for a while.

But yeah since the fall of USSR they've been slowing shifting towards buying from NATO countries/allies, with German Leopard tanks having replaced T-72s and recently buying artillery units from South Korea.

Another upside:

- Making it clear that you're not in the 'other guys' camp.

A NATO Finland would have been incredibly threatening to the Soviet Union. A friendly, non-aligned Finland that just wants to be independent, without stepping on anyone's toes is a useful buffer state.

After the second world war, Finland had to tread very, very carefully.

Finland is not a member of NATO and it does not have any foreign army on its territory so it can make a decision based on technical characteristics and economical (not political) factors.

With the MiG-29s you had the entire former NVA personnel, hardware and experience.

Introducing Russian (or other non-NATO stuff) would require extensive trainings, quite possible new sets of tools, and who knows if any Russian stuff could be made to interoperate with NATO technology.

Inheriting old Soviet equipment from East Germany is not remotely comparable to purchasing new non-NATO equipment to meet current requirements.

It probably depends on the type of equipment they buy, that is, how complex it is and what are the maintenance costs.

For example, Turkey recently declared that they will buy some kind of Russian advanced anti-aircraft system so they probably think that it will be cheaper in long term than buying it from a NATO member. Yet, even in this case they had quite strong tensions with NATO and it is not clear if Germany wants to have (and can afford) similar tensions with NATO, even if these Russian helicopters are technically better.

Mi-26: (MTOW - Empty Weight) ≅ 27800kg