Fetchez La Vache

Retrofitting a GAU 17

Just a note on the Marines' long-suffering V 22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. If you've followed this at all, you're probably aware that the Osprey -- intended to be faster than a helicopter, but do most of the same things helicopters do -- has had a long history of controversy, mostly due to a series of crashes during development and testing. Tilt-rotor is an inherently difficult technology, and experts have argued the pros and cons to the point of exhaustion. I don't know enough, myself, to have an opinion. The aircraft has finally made it into operation and is being used in Iraq. Anyway, one of the sub-issues that was raised almost at once is that it's unarmed. Designed to be a transport aircraft, it was not given any built-in weaponry, nor hard points for attaching modular munitions. It has a rear ramp for loading and unloading, and there have been some re-fittings with a machine gun that the crew can fire out the open ramp, but the arc of fire is obviously limited to a portion of the aircraft's rear aspect.

Now, there's a design for a ventrally-mounted, sensor-controlled gatling gun, operable by the crew chief (not the pilot). The gun is the GAU 17, a very standard 7.62mm (rifle calibre) rotary weapon, used on a wide range of aircraft, ships, and vehicles, both in our military and to a lesser extent in that of the UK. There's some demo video out there, if you're interested at all. Story at Defense Tech.

My only reason for posting this or caring, for that matter, is just that I find these retrofits interesting -- we learned in Vietnam that anything that flies low and slow and has the mission of landing in potentially hostile areas ("hot LZs") really ought to have forward firing weapons. Don't know how that escaped the attention of the designers.