Taliban Air Force Commences Jet Operations

As someone who is intimately familiar with this particular line of work I simply can't help but read this article and see this as nothing more than clickbait. Yes this is "news" per say and this story "matters" but whats being implied by this headline and a MASSIVE exaggeration of reality to the uninformed.

Yes they do have airworthy aircraft but these things are not exactly points of concern. Take the paragraph about the still functional Blackhawks and being able to use the sabotaged ones for spare parts for years to come to keep the rest operational.

No, they can't. At least not in the manner folks may be thinking. These things are not cars it's not the same as having a spare parts car laying around. The amount of maintenance required to keep a military helicopter operational is astounding. When the ones they have flying now break down chances are they will remain broken down, there is no jerry rigging these things together to make them work. I'm not talking about parts and services that you can skip over like most folks do when they take their vehicle for an oil change and it's "recommended" to also flush the transmission and do this or that. I'm talking specialized parts required for flight that break and break often that's well beyond the scope of simply taking it off of the broken Blackhawk sitting over there. It doesn't work that way. Unless the Taliban has millions of dollars to spend per month on that fleet and direct contracts with Sikorsky HQ for parts and services then those Blackhawks they have aren't leaving the ground again after the first major component failure. These things need massive overhauls and phase maintenance tearing them down to the shell on a routine basis to remain functional.

Here's a little secret that may or may not be a secret. Even in America with our, for all intents and purposes, infinite amount of money and direct contracts with Sikorsky and Boeing facilities and specialized trained mechanics and civilian contact team maintenance experts....Around half of our military aircraft are down for maintenance at any given moment in time. It's hard to comprehend how much sheer maintenance these things require in order to remain operational unless you see it.

Trust me, when the Talibans new flying toys break, they are going to stay that way. Don't worry too much about it.

 

Admittedly a lot of the maintenance on these helicopters is due to our extremely high standards for safety in America and the Western world. Standards that I'm sure the Taliban likely doesn't have. Many of the "grounding" conditions for an aircraft aren't actually issues that would make the thing fall out of the sky or anything but rather safety precautions to ensure nothing bad happens. For example certain components have specific tolerances when being installed and if they are so much as .01 micrometers off tolerance then the aircraft is grounded until it's fixed. Would it being out of tolerance by such a minuscule amount result in catastrophic failure? Probably not, chances are nothing would happen at all but those are chances we don't take.

Same with the routine inspections after X amount of hours flown. Most have heard the old adage of like every one hour of flight time requires 10 hours of maintenance or something. Much of that is due to routine inspections at time based intervals. If the aircraft wasn't torn down for major overhaul and inspected and preventative maintenance performed after 100 hours would it crash at 105 hours? Not likely. But with saying that, these helos DO "hard break" A LOT. Hard break as in critical component failure not just like a broken gauge in the cockpit or something. And when these critical components, of which there are dozens, do end up breaking there is usually no taking it over to the work bench and repairing it and reinstalling it. You need a new one specifically manufactured to the standard and shipped to you from the manufacturers depot. Without it that bird isn't going anywhere.

Military helicopter maintenance vs airplane maintenance is akin to being able to roughly fix anything on a 1960s muscle car in your garage with a simple socket set and a big hammer to trying to work on a 6 figure custom built Bugatti. Even if it were as easy as swapping out spare parts from the broken helos they have the Taliban would run through those spare parts in a matter of months. These things break A LOT. Even basic civilian helos like the Robinsons are extremely complex machines. If the average joe saw behind the scenes what they do to that helo every few days in the maintenance hangar and knew that if even ONE of those hundreds of critical components fails in flight you're going to die I'm sure society would be doing a whole lot less Grand Canyon air tours lol.

The Taliban can/will likely keep jerry rigging their Blackhawks and flying them with all sorts of issues that we Americans would consider grounding conditions and unsafe for flight. However, stuff that they actually need for that thing to even fly at all is going to start breaking really soon and there is no jerry rigging that. I'm pretty confident that your friend will have similar sentiments.

 

Perhaps, but I believe you are overestimating the Taliban's ability to maintain operational rotary wing aircraft and underestimating the maintenance required to keep rotary wing aircraft flyable. When the US was in Afghanistan these were nowhere near self contained airbases, they required near 24/7 resupply from home to keep the aircraft operational. Sure they had a few spare parts on hand and not everything that broke required a C-17 to bring you stuff, but often, and I mean often, when that aircraft broke it stayed broke until the next C-17 showed up with the parts required to fix it. Often times the entire helicopter had to be loaded up on cargo transports and flown to larger maintenance facilities off site for deep level maintenance and repairs.

Put it this way. As we speak right now there are hundreds of US Army helicopters grounded in America awaiting repairs, services, or maintenance. Many of them have been down for weeks waiting for essential parts to come in to repair them or are in the middle of deep phase maintenance overhauls that take months to complete per aircraft. If America itself, who builds these things with access to all available parts and facilities, doesn't have the ability to keep even 2/3rds of it's helicopters flyable at all times what exactly makes you think the Taliban can? Every nation that we sell those Blackhawks to has access to American based service contracts through Sikorsky to help them maintain these things. Without a steady access to those service contracts for parts and repairs then when that Blackhawk breaks down it stays that way. And even in America with our literal army of trained mechanics and civilian specialized mechanic/service advisors our Blackhawks break down A LOT. And when I say A LOT put it this way. If civilian airliners broke down prior to takeoff even 1/10th as often as military helicopters do then nobody would ever fly commercial again and every airline would be bankrupt by tomorrow morning.