German Tiger helicopters grounded

The manufacturer Eurocopter gave out a warning that a batch of titanium bolts from 2013 used in the rotor control might have defects (hydrogen embrittlement). They've only got about a dozen Tigers flying, and none are currently deployed abroad. So grounding them is probably not a big deal.

Still interesting that the defect has only been found now, and they might have been flying with brittle bolts for 6 years.

a reply to: moebius
Unfortunately its just another nail in the coffin for the Tiger in Australian service. I had the opportunity to talk to some Australian Army helicopter engineers a couple of weeks back. They panned both the Tiger and its troop carrying counterpart the MRH-90. Apart from being very temperamental the support from Airbus has not been the best, with often large delays in critical parts or critically, technical backup. Something I have seen with commercial Airbus products myself. They told me there was strong talk and rumors that not only will the Tigers be replaced in ADF service, which has been openly revealed recently (ironically only a week after FOC was announced), but that there is talk that Sikorsky may make an unsolicited offer with rapid delivery of the latest Blackhawk variant to replace the MRH-90 as well. Airbus/Eurocopter helicopters needs to lift their game, and fast.

The Australian Tigers have never really been entirely operational, from what I gather. The Tiger has not been a good buy for our Australian friends.

The Tiger helicopter fleet has not yet delivered the original capability expected by the Australian Government, and continues to experience higher than expected sustainment costs and lower than expected aircraft availability.

Aussie Audit Office report

On the other side of this is Germany's problems with having any military kit available to be used.

There were issues even before the ADF accepted them into service.The money on favourite at the time were Zulu Cobras...

a reply to: moebius

They already ungrounded them again after checking the bolts.

a reply to: mightmight
Yes they have been flying for a while again.But a replacement is being sought already.
Tiger replacement

You know what would save us all time?

A single thread that told us what part of the German military IS mission capable

a reply to: FredT
Unfortunately that would be a very small thread these days. Its a very sad state of affairs, and somewhat worrying when you can see the rise of Russia being a potential problem with destabilization and the German people seemingly apathetic towards it.

a reply to: Blackfinger
There were some interesting discussions there in the comments section on both the Tiger and Apache. For what its worth I think the Zulu Cobra is probably the best compromise and was unwisely overlooked last time. Price wise it would be very attractive as an alternative to Tiger.

Seeing it shared a lot of stuff with the Wokkas I thought it would have been a no brainer with procurement.Australia is 80% desert so anything that suffers in the Big Sandpit overseas would have the same issues here.It was found very early on that the Avionics in the Tiger had insufficient cooling to deal with Australian conditions.
Mrh-90,s were suffering airframe cracking very early on as well off memory.
If you read the book "Hellfire" about the Brits using the WAh64 in action it quickly became apparent how the low range impacted on time over operations.