Adding to the list of South Korea’s “indigenous” military hardware such as the tank, APC, jet trainer and OICW rifle is the UH, or military utility helicopter. Not to be confused with a AH (or in Korea’s case, a KAH) or attack helicopter, a UH is something more akin to a Blackhawk or a Lynx.
Late last week Korean Aerospace Industries unvealed the first prototype of the KUH which has been given the designation “Surion.” Apparently, Surion is the combination of two Korean words meaning “eagle” and “million.” KAI has proudly announced that Korea is the 11th nation in the world to develop an indigenous rotary-wing aircraft. Considering that the so-called KUH could not have been made without a 1.3 trillion won contract with Eurocopter (or a U.S.-made T-700 turboshaft engine for that matter), someone should give KAI a copy of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and open it up to the page that contains the word “indigenous.”
Not a bad looking bird, but methinks it looks a lot like this combined with this.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s great that Korea is coming along with its own budding aerospace industry, but I’ve always found it amazing how brazen the country can be in claiming local ingenuity when it’s so easily refuted. I recall having talks with a Korean engineer from KEPCO in the late 90s who laughed when I asked him about the government’s claim that its KSNP and KSNP+ nuclear reactors were home grown. He confirmed what I already surmised…they were about 95 percent based on technology and modelling from Combustion Engineering.
C’mon guys, credit where it’s do.
DLB
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Didn’t Wiki get the memo that helicopters were in the cave with the bear and the tiger?
I knew indigenous from the plant world (‘Pseudolithos are indigenous to mainly Somalia’) but it figures that indigenous ubiquity can show up in military hardware, too. But heck, if it gets product sold overseas, please, be my guest.
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Credit is DUE. C’mon.
Und, ja. Was fuer einer schönen Kuh!
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Oops. Mein Fehler. Traurig.
DLB
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Korean papers appear pretty unanimous in calling this thing an “indigenous” Korean invention. Foreign publications are calling it “homegrown” which, although still pushing it, is a lot more appropriate term.
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Americans take credit for inventing the atomic bomb when German physicists did all the work.
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Jewish, German-born physicists with American citizenship who had fled their country fearing persecution… but that’s how America works. We take everybody from every country and put them to work on figuring out how to blow everything the fuck up.
Korea would prefer that based on the water-clock of King Saejeong, they developed a perfectly functional combustion engine, and then from that, tanks and attack helicopters. But it DOESN’T work that way.
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DefensePro publication gets it the most accurate by calling the KAI a “systems integrator” meaning that KAI is taking a number of off-the-shelf parts and “integrating” them into a complete system. The engines are American and I believe the same ones used on a Blackhawk. The airframe and a lot of the components are from a Eurocopter Puma. As a matter of fact, a lot of the parts were tested on existing Pumas in Europe before being given the green light to put into the Surion prototype. I mean, hell. There is NO way that a fully “indigenous” military utility helicopter can be developed in just three short years (the KUH program was started in 2006) if you are not going liberally use off-the-shelf, already proven components!
60% of the parts will be made in Korea proper and will probably be Korean owned, thus have the availability to export to other countries which is something I believe KAI will no doubt try to do.
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South Koreans can claim credit for inventing helicopters as long as they get on with developing a military capable of allowing USFK to withdraw.
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# 9,
That will take awhile… All those “indigenous” new goodies are still in the prototype phase and won’t be deployed until like 2011-2014 and won’t have enough quantity density to make a difference until many years afterwards.
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Well, Car and Driver magazine will take the trouble to call the Alabama-assembled Hyundai Sonata to be an American made car even though the parts could be sourced from anywhere.
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Very good article about how the Surion was designed and who (Eurocopter and KAI) did what to develop it.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/SURION081409.xml&headline=Korea%20Aerospace%20Produces%20New%20Utility%20Helo
Looks like the Surion neatly fits into Eurocopter’s product line and they could potentially help KAI market it…
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Thanks to the Surion, Eurocopter now has an answer to Agusta-Westland’s AW139/149. Of course, considering that the AW139 has had an eight year head start, the Eurocopter/KAI marketing team has their work cut out for them.
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