November 7th, 2011
The forthcoming Chuck Pfarrer book on Neptune’s Spear (the mission to get Osama bin Laden) sounds like it differs quite a lot from the account in the New Yorker. For instance, Pfarrer claims that the SEAL helicopter crash inside the compound after the mission had concluded while it was attempting to take off. The details are so divergent, actually, that one of these reporters is very wrong. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out in the reconciliation.
But leaving aside the discrepancies, the most intriguing bit leaked from the Pfarrer account is that the SEALs were using “Stealth Hawks”–a modified quiet Black Hawk–but that those helos are not state-of-the art. Pfarrer says that there are Ghost Hawks, which are even better. And have a “whisper mode.” In a quickie search, I can’t find very much (anything, actually) written about Ghost Hawks. (Other than the VTOL version.) If you’re into military porn and know more, please share.
Even if Pfarrer is all wet about everything else, I’d love to believe we have something like a Ghost Hawk.
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That’s total B.S….everyone knows that only Blue Thunder has whisper mode.
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From the DC–more important than our hardware:
But Obama’s announcement…“rendered moot all of the intelligence that was gathered from the nexus of al-Qaida. The computer drives, the hard drives, the videocasettes, the CDs, the thumb drives, everything. Before that could even be looked through, the political decision was made to take credit for the operation.”
Jason O. November 7, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Plus, the idea of “whisper mode,” i.e., somehow removing the local noise generation from the boundary layer around the rotor blade, would require a shoo-in noble prize winning evolution of fluid dynamics/mech eng…but who knows? Maybe they figured it out.