I would have to ask why the French and Germans don't have anywhere near the same problems with the Tiger and they've used it in combat? So what where is this mantra of Tiger is rubbish coming from? Certainly not from the Army Tiger ARH aircrew. They love it.
You want to know - look at some of the comments between your comment and now - it generally comes down to ignorance with some poisoning from MRH-90. Note I've never been involved with MRH-90 and can't - and won't - make any comments on that capability.
There's enough of my posts through here that lay out AIR87's selection and use of Tiger in the Regt. The reality is most of Tiger is shrouded in a seemingly impenetrable layer of BS myth. Even stuff like the famed ANAO report is full of errors - some of which I'm convinced was insiders trying to push a point of view.
Some key ones:
Apache would have been better. With hindsight, possibly. But we were being offered D's without Longbow and with a bunch of avionics stripped out. Effectively A's. They'd have been out of date well before a feasible MLU / CAP. It was a close run thing, but at the time the -64D Longbow was the final version going to be made and Tiger had a better starting point and way ahead.
It can't communicate. It was never designed to. AIR87 is the last major Army project before BMS was stood up. It was going to have L16, but the CoA removed that after Army stood up BMS. No matter which variant won, it wouldn't have been fitted, nor been able to communicate.
We didn't buy enough. We bout exactly what we wanted. We didn't give numbers, we gave an availability rate. We wanted x% of the fleet available 60% of the time and y% at 80%. Tenders had to submit their fleet numbers. Eurocopter said 22, Boeing 21 and Bell 19. This is the point where I think the CoA made it's biggest error - we didn't ask for clarification on the maintenance hours per flying hour. Eurocopter and Bell both gave unrealistic numbers that, because they were new helicopters with modern digital avionics, HUMS and fault finding, we accepted. Just like every single platform we have decided since then. Turns out, both of them we about 33% under the reality. Funnily enough, about 20 - 30% more spares, frames and workforce would have made the fleet a dream. BTW - the first point about Apache? We could only afford 1x of them. So we wouldn't have been able to buy 21 anyhow...
IOC was delayed. I worked on the deployment plan to put jets into operational theatres in the late 00's and early 10's, before IOC was called. The delays to IOC related primarily to three things - one of which isn't possible for
any attack helicopter, one of which was a result of us turning LPAs into LHDs and one of which was a problem that we should have focused on earlier - but wasn't an issue in fighting in those areas at that time. It was a political decision to not throw them in, not a capability issue.
Technicality. Tiger is the most complicated thing that the Army owned until the CRV comes in. Senior's underestimating this complexity hurt us for years. It was just meant to be a modern, gunned up Kiowa - but we bought something much, much more capable. It was sold to us with the same 1990s ideas about maintenance that the US and Europe followed - HUMS tells you everything and you don't need complex fault finding or highly skilled technicians. So we raped RAEME and AAvn. Oops; turns out you do need that stuff.... To give an idea, be 100% reliable for the maintenance of ~30 1971 VW Beetles. Stuff you need a 1/2" spanner, a Phillips head screwdriver and some tape and that's it. Now, rip them out and replace with some 2008 Porsche 911 GT2s. Imagine what you need to learn.
CoA relationships. Let's not kid ourselves, it's been rough. Not all of that was Eurocopter though - the CoA did some really silly stuff. I cringe when I see that 'we've learnt the lessons of AIR87'. Ha. But let's not throw too many stones. With Tiger, we generally had front row seats as we were making it work unlike the other three nations. We pushed hard. And demanded some dumb things. On some things we got shit service. I think AIR 9000 poisoned a lot of this, but we had worked out most of our misunderstandings and errors by early 2010s.
Australian-isation killed it. We made three alterations, one no cost and two that turned a profit. They had no delay and the French retrofitted two, the Spanish all three and the German's one.
---
The reality is that the Army was playing catch up. We needed attack helicopters, and had delayed purchasing it through the 1980s and 90s. We got exactly what we asked for; perhaps we didn't think about what we wanted well enough - but I'm not sure on that. The tender and initial doctrine was sound. We've updated it heaps obviously, as we've learnt the capability. But it was always meant to be gone by the end of the 2020s, and hopefully the replacement won't be such a learning curve. We underestimated the technical requirements, we put too much faith in the latest technology in glossy brochures (oh, hello Collins, Attack, Hobart, P-8, F-35, BMS, AS4, CIOG, etc etc etc...) and didn't sell it's successes. The frustrating tale about Tiger isn't Tiger - but sitting in Canberra watching mistakes like these being made again, again and again....
