Border face-off: China and India each deploy 3,000 troops

[Double Edge]

Negative, they don't. Black boxes are a requirement for aircraft under FAA control. US Military helicopters fall under military ATC and operate under visual flight rules. No black boxes needed. Plus it removes one more avenue where an enemy could detect an aircraft.

This must be a US only rule then. Taiwanese had a black box in the Black Hawk they lost. So did we in the Mi-17

There will be a military court of enquiry. This court is not obliged to release anything to the public.

But i'd imagine public pressure will demand they say something.

[Albany Rifles]

You were on to something when you said loss of control due to wind. This comes closest to explaining what might have happened.

But people will challenge it. They will ask how can a gust of wind disable a military grade helicopter.

One that is designed to hover, hug ridge lines, tree lines and do pop ups.

The controls on this aircraft dwarfs anything you can find in the civilian world.

And this is exactly what the issue was in the OH-58A...it was selected for production at a time when using like we did that day was not US doctrine. We were adapting a 1960s/early70s design to new 1980s doctrine. Hugging ridge lines, tree lines and do pop ups was not what the US Army was doing with light helicopters in Vietnam. The failure of control because of tailwinds was discovered in new doctrinal use...which is exactly why they came out with the OH-59C with a more powerful engine and improved tail rotor drive train. It was discovered during development of the Joint Air Attack Team work at Fort Hunter Liggett after the war.

[Albany Rifles]

This must be a US only rule then. Taiwanese had a black box in the Black Hawk they lost. So did we in the Mi-17

There will be a military court of enquiry. This court is not obliged to release anything to the public.

But i'd imagine public pressure will demand they say something.

Hence why I said what I did about US aircraft and operations. It is also why helicopters use visual flight rules. If it is in inclement weather they respond to ATC guidance but not when they can see.

[Double Edge]

Pursuing this loss of control idea is finding some interesting results. Turns out there's numerous instances where this can arise leading to loss of control.

Rotor Wash and Wake Turbulence

In the first a blackhawk takes off and twenty seven seconds later a light plane coming into land flips over because of the rotor wash. Wow! Same deal with Wake turbulence.

A helicopter flying at low altitude, close to hills unseen due to fog, something as massive as a Mi-17 or the Taiwanese Black Hawk is going to create a great deal of turbulence that will affect its stability.

Now let's throw in a weather variable

https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/weather-impacts/

Another problem — one unique to flying helicopters — is loss of tail rotor effectiveness (LTE). The purpose of a tail rotor in a helicopter with one main rotor is to neutralize the torque created by the main rotor. If the tail rotor’s performance is impeded, it can lead to an uncontrollable spin (rotation of the fuselage). The magnitude of the LTE and difficulty of landing can be significantly affected by the speed and direction of the wind.

Wind direction also is important. For example, winds from approximately 60 degrees left of the nose (10 o’clock) can blow the main rotor vortex (swirling air generated by the helicopter downwash) into the tail rotor, greatly increasing the turbulence of the airflow. Any significant tail wind can decrease tail rotor effectiveness. This decrease may be due to a loss of translational lift, requiring more main rotor thrust and generating more torque than the tail rotor can counteract. The aircraft may also begin to weathervane with its nose into the relative wind. This can also cause an accelerating spin.

A typical LTE accident occurred on May 29, 2013, north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. The pilot of a Bell 206B was conducting wildlife survey work with two biologists aboard the helicopter. While slowing for an attempted landing, the helicopter began to spin to the right. The pilot lost control of the aircraft, and it crashed into the woods, killing the pilot and one passenger and seriously injuring the other passenger.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada concluded, “The helicopter was operating in a flight regime where it was exposed to the left crosswind and tail wind, which would have placed the relative wind into the critical azimuth zone. The helicopter experienced LTE, causing a loss of directional control at a height above the trees that precluded an effective recovery

Wind interferes with the rotor down wash to further complicate turbulence (!)

Bingo!

Now I believe both Generals were victims of Rotor Downwash/LTE accidents.

There may be very little time to take counter measures once you realise you're in the danger zone or you realise it too late

The report said

The helicopter’s flight recorder was sent to the U.S. on Jan. 8 for investigation into the Jan. 2 incident. The Taiwan Transportation Safety Board (TTSB) had ruled out mechanical malfunction as the cause based on a preliminary reading of the data retrieved from the black box.

According to the report, rapidly changing weather conditions along with inadequate “situation awareness” contributed to the fatal crash. Defective cockpit resource management (CRM) could also have been involved, which is when the pilot and co-pilot fail to follow due procedures that compromise their response in an emergency, wrote UDN.

The chopper crashed into a hilltop under cloudy conditions in the mountains of northern Taiwan.

They got caught in either LTE or washout and could not respond in time. This is termed as 'inadequate situation awareness'. Harsh but true.

This is never going to appear in a news report because its too technical but now i have a better idea

Cheers AR

[Double Edge]

Shorter version

The plane capsizes because it got caught in the Black Hawks Wash. This has to be seen to be believed.

The part most people will not understand is that wash or wake by the rotor takes a good two minutes to clear. Had the plane arrived two minutes later it would have been fine.

Imagine being in a powerful helicopter at low altitude with limited visibility and being caught in your own down draft

Pilot increases thrust for more lift but there is no lift.

The increased turbulence causes a loss of lift which means your heli goes down in an uncontrolled manner.

[Double Edge]

Your average civilian pilot should never fly in bad weather but I would expect a trained military pilot to do better, much better.

A sane recommendation to make is if visibility is poor and the terrain is hilly then the best option is not to fly.

Good luck getting a military pilot to agree with that. They will no doubt say they are confident of their skills.

I've heard stories of pilots pushing their craft to the limits of their flight ceilings in the mountains in poor weather to rescue soldiers with altitude sickness or to deliver much needed supplies. That is how committed they are where they will ignore their instinct of self preservation in the service of others. They call these people good soldiers. Highly decorated.

With a daredevil background like that in the AF. These guys are just not going to listen.

The passenger(s) should just say no in that case.

[Albany Rifles]

Shorter version

The plane capsizes because it got caught in the Black Hawks Wash. This has to be seen to be believed.

The part most people will not understand is that wash or wake by the rotor takes a good two minutes to clear. Had the plane arrived two minutes later it would have been fine.

Imagine being in a powerful helicopter at low altitude with limited visibility and being caught in your own down draft

Pilot increases thrust for more lift but there is no lift.

The increased turbulence causes a loss of lift which means your heli goes down in an uncontrolled manner.

The same happens in the wake or near any rotary wing aircraft or large jet aircraft. Being caught in jet/rotor wash is a real threat. It can cause loss of control or an engine to be cutout because it is cut off from air. Seeing that this is a small private aircraft with a fairly low power engine not surprised at all by the outcome.

[tbm3fan]

The same happens in the wake or near any rotary wing aircraft or large jet aircraft. Being caught in jet/rotor wash is a real threat. It can cause loss of control or an engine to be cutout because it is cut off from air. Seeing that this is a small private aircraft with a fairly low power engine not surprised at all by the outcome.

The Co-Pilot of AA 587 caused the crash of that jet near Rockaway in 2001 because of an over reaction to jet wash from a 747 flight a few minutes before him. The Airbus A300 was yawing a little and the Co-Pilot tried to counter it by moving the rudder hard left then hard right exceeding the capabilities of the rudder to handle such stress. Consequently snapped the rudder off and killed a total of 265 people. AA 587 was cautioned before they took off about the prior JAL flight.

[Dazed]

I am no expert.

The vortices are the results of generating lift. They are at their strongest when are slow and at a high angle of attack. Think landing and take off. Atmospheric conditions have an effect on the strength and duration of the vortex. The aircraft encountering a vortex is going to perform as it always does. The problem is the air mass it encounters is a large parcel of rotating air. Think of it as you are in your personal watercraft on a smooth ocean. A Tsunami wave approaches, you enter it head on as encounter the wave your craft is still performing as advertised and will continue to do so as the it is being thrown asunder by the wave. The area you most likely will encounter a vortex is take off and landings mostly due to aircraft following the same flight path.

Delta Air Lines Flight 9570 an American DC-10 killed a Delta DC-9. This crash gave rise to the wake separation rules.

Just curious, how does this relate to Indo-Sino border tension?

[Double Edge]

Vortex Ring State

a helicopter can disrupt its own flight with its own wake!

It’s called a “vortex ring state”, and happens if the helicopter descends vertically above a certain vertical speed. It can lead to a very dangerous situation, with massive loss of lift. The easiest way to avoid it is to descend with some forward speed, even very slow - that’s what helicopters almost always do, if you observe them carefully.

If you have to descend vertically for some reason, then it must be very slowly, typically below 300 ft/min, but I wouldn’t advise it…

https://www.quora.com/Does-the-down-...-just-below-it

If you lose lift you descend faster than is recommended and enter a Vortex ring state.

It's like you're in trouble already with LTE and then this VRS thing jumps on top....

[Double Edge]

Just curious, how does this relate to Indo-Sino border tension?

The General in question was Army chief during the Doklam trouble at the start of this thread. There is a tribute to him few pages back that shows he was in the forefront of our actions to counter China.

Reason i pushed it i wanted to understand how his helicopter went down leading to his death along with 13 others in the Mi-17

I then learn a Taiwanese chief of Army Staff died in a similar accident just two years ago.

Just could not understand how or why these accidents happened with top flight aircraft with very skilled pilots.

I'm getting a better idea now. None of these explanations will appear in the media. At best we will get one or two paras after the enquiry.

Phrased carefully and i expect vaguely not to create further controversy.

You can further ask what has SCS, or Taiwan and Japan even Australia have to do with Indo China border tension ?

Grey zone operations. Operations carried out below the threshold of war. All are one and the same.

And here is the further complicating factor. grey zone takes place in more domains than just military. Economic, Diplomatic, Space, Cyber.

I'm also discussing what Quad does here because that is the arrangement put in place to handle grey zone. Quad does more than naval exercises.

How many threads would i need otherwise to discuss these and they would be all separated instead of being in one thread.

Figure out China's play book and beat them at their own game.

[Firestorm]

Grey zone operations. Operations carried out below the threshold of war. All are one and the same.

And here is the further complicating factor. grey zone takes place in more domains than just military. Economic, Diplomatic, Space, Cyber.

I'm also discussing what Quad does here because that is the arrangement put in place to handle grey zone. Quad does more than naval exercises.

How many threads would i need otherwise to discuss these and they would be all separated instead of being in one thread.

Figure out China's play book and beat them at their own game.

Are you suggesting this crash or that of the Taiwanese Army Chief was the result of foul play? What exactly is the evidence in either of the cases?

[Double Edge]

Are you suggesting this crash or that of the Taiwanese Army Chief was the result of foul play? What exactly is the evidence in either of the cases?

Not at all. But there are commentators making these points. I wanted to avoid that and go to town on AR's loss of control explanation. It can explain the reason for both crashes without CT.

Thing is unless you understand how these wake phenomena work there is no way for a layperson to comprehend one plane can capsize another following too soon in the former's wake as can a helicopter getting caught in its own wake and going down too.

Yes, this can happen with military grade equipment and experienced pilots.

[Double Edge]

Good science fiction writing there.

Good. Hope you think this next one qualifies as well

Satellite photos reveal worrying antennas in South China Sea | News.com.au | Dec 21 2021

He refers to a CSIS article and then links it with another from Brookings.

International affairs think-tank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) warns Beijing is “taking major steps toward improving its electronic warfare (EW), communications, and intelligence-gathering capabilities near the South China Sea”.

And that means potentially turning the contested waterway into a communication and navigation “dead zone”.

I was talking about no go zones. This guy is talking about dead zones. Dead zone just means things don't work.

How far is a dead zone from a kill zone ? Not far

Still does not translate into a no go zone as we see with Chinese positions in the Himalayas. They don't mind building things in non tactical positions.

Question is how to effect a dead zone ?

Using electronic warfare to hack into and disrupt the other's operations.

CSIS reports China’s artificial island fortresses at Subi and Fiery Cross Reefs in the South China Sea feature extensive communications and intelligence gathering facilities. There’s also a network of sensor towers between Hainan Island and the Paracel Islands.

They’re ideally placed to detect, monitor – and interfere with – any electronic activity in the region. And that means vital equipment may not perform as expected.

Drones could be hacked. Navigation signals could be distorted. Datalinks could be hijacked.

Communications could be both intercepted and jammed.

Just like that. Where is the proven ability of the Chinese to do this as yet.

This means combat aircraft may not find their targets – whether that is a refuelling tanker or a hostile warship. Drones may turn upon their owners. It could break the complex web of data sharing that’s supposed to make modern weapons, such as the F-35 stealth fighter, overwhelmingly effective.

And any digital device may be hacked.

“Our military systems are vulnerable,” the Brookings report warns. “We need to face that reality by halting the purchase of insecure weapons and support systems and by incorporating the realities of offensive cyberattacks into our military planning.”

What is the basis of that Brookings report ?

A 2018 GAO report expressed concern regarding the lack of secure and patchable U.S. weapons systems. The report observed that “in operational testing, the [Department of Defense] routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in systems that were under development, yet program officials GAO met with believed their systems were secure and discounted some test results as unrealistic.” It’s a similar attitude to corporate executives who believe that they can’t be hacked—and equally naive.

An updated GAO report from earlier this year found some improvements, but the basic problem remained: “DOD is still learning how to contract for cybersecurity in weapon systems, and selected programs we reviewed have struggled to incorporate systems’ cybersecurity requirements into contracts.” While DOD now appears aware of the issue of lack of cybersecurity requirements, they’re still not sure yet how to fix it, and in three of the five cases GAO reviewed, DOD simply chose to not include the requirements at all.

The military believes they're good. Until one fine day they learn they're not.

Militaries around the world are now exploiting these vulnerabilities in weapons systems to carry out operations. When Israel in 2007 bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor, the raid was preceded by what is believed to have been a cyber attack on Syrian air defenses that resulted in radar screens showing no threat as bombers zoomed overhead. In 2018, a 29-country NATO exercise, Trident Juncture, that included cyberweapons was disrupted by Russian GPS jamming. NATO does try to test cyberweapons outside such exercises, but has limited scope in doing so. In May, Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, said that “NATO computer systems are facing almost daily cyberattacks.”

The war of the future will not only be about explosions, but will also be about disabling the systems that make armies run. It’s not (solely) that bases will get blown up; it’s that some bases will lose power, data, and communications. It’s not that self-driving trucks will suddenly go mad and begin rolling over friendly soldiers; it’s that they’ll casually roll off roads or into water where they sit, rusting, and in need of repair. It’s not that targeting systems on guns will be retargeted to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; it’s that many of them could simply turn off and not turn back on again.

That is how the dead zone comes about. A successful exploit disables things.

So, how do we prepare for this next war? First, militaries need to introduce a little anarchy into their planning. Let’s have wargames where essential systems malfunction or are subverted—not all of the time, but randomly. To help combat siloed military thinking, include some civilians as well. Allow their ideas into the room when predicting potential enemy action. And militaries need to have well-developed backup plans, for when systems are subverted. In Joe Haldeman’s 1975 science-fiction novel The Forever War, he postulated a “stasis field” that forced his space marines to rely on nothing more than Roman military technologies, like javelins. We should be thinking in the same direction.

NATO isn’t yet allowing civilians not employed by NATO or associated military contractors access to their training cyber ranges where vulnerabilities could be discovered and remediated before battlefield deployment. Last year, one of us (Tarah) was listening to a NATO briefing after the end of the 2020 Cyber Coalition exercises, and asked how she and other information security researchers could volunteer to test cyber ranges used to train its cyber incident response force. She was told that including civilians would be a “welcome thought experiment in the tabletop exercises,” but including them in reality wasn’t considered. There is a rich opportunity for improvement here, providing transparency into where improvements could be made.

Introduce failures as part of exercises is a good idea.

They need to do penetration testing.

And this is the state of affairs with the Americans. India has yet to designate a cyber force command (!)

All bullshit!. We define and control the battlespace. Not the Chinese. At the very least, the Soviets were able to force a battle of their choosing on us. There is zero ways for the Chinese to force a battle of their choosing on us. Every move they try to make, we pre-empt them. They have a wargame at sea. Our ships are in place watching them before their fleet arrives. I'm not impressed with Dahm.

With information superiority they are looking to challenge that control of the battlespace.

It's been twenty years that i've been hearing how American and allied systems are facing cyber attacks.

Don't hear much about attacks going the other way. The Chinese don't talk about them just like Indian incursions taking place in the mountains in their areas of perception.

These cyber ops fall under grey zone so its a matter of time before we hear of strange things happening. If its made public at all.

[Double Edge]

Chinese do have a listening network under the seas. Deployed between Hainan and the Paracel Islands.

Exploring China's unmanned Ocean Network | CSIS | Jun 16 2020

The network constructed in the northern South China Sea between early 2016 and 2019 is referred to as a demonstration system. However, future plans for the Blue Ocean Information Network involve expanding the sensor and communications network to the rest of the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and other ocean areas far from Chinese territory. While the Blue Ocean Information Network is largely cast as an environmental monitoring and communications system, the military utility of its sensing and communications functions makes its development important to monitor.

Still experimental

The ability to rapidly relocate platforms and sensors during a crisis may afford Chinese authorities information advantages in a crisis. This could include persistent monitoring of contested waters or a disputed island. An obvious military application might be to use the platforms and deployable underwater systems to close gaps in radar, sonar, or communications coverage in a military confrontation. The floating platforms also offer unique capabilities for crisis response. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, for example, they could be installed along a coastline to provide air and surface radar coverage as well as cellular communications to affected communities.

The potential deployment of E-Stations and other components of the Blue Ocean Information Network farther afield would raise security, political, and legal questions, especially in disputed areas. How would other states respond if China placed a fixed platform on an uninhabited reef outside the Paracels, ostensibly for environmental research? Scarborough Shoal would be an especially provocative location, and a deployment there would likely spark a new crisis in both Sino-Philippine and Sino-U.S. relations. In addition, coastal states are legally entitled to regulate marine scientific research in their exclusive economic zones and to refuse permission to anchor platforms to their continental shelves. That means deployments in contested waters of the South and East China Seas would be sure to provoke outcries, and potentially at-sea confrontations, with neighboring states.

If they start deploying these stations in unwanted locations, best thing is to do is impound them with their crew. Problem solved.