VALUE OF SURVIVABILITY ENHANCEMENT TECHNIQUES

Military helicopter survivability is dependent on a multitude of interrelated conditions including the nature of the threat; susceptibility factors such as evasive tactics, countermeasures, and intelligence on enemy deployments; and vulnerability reductions measures. An understanding of the relative value of these measures is vital to the designer, who must optimize a mix of techniques -- sometimes complementary and sometimes competitive -- at a constrained cost. A recent study at LTV has confirmed the overriding value of terrain flight to survivability enhancement and identified signature reduction as an important, though secondary, contributor. Vulnerability reduction has great value when small numbers of threat projectiles are encountered, but the utility of vulnerable area reduction diminishes with an increased number of hits. The lethality of current threat weapons can deny large areas of the battlefield to helicopters. Modern survivability techniques serve to reduce the size of these denied areas.