Pesawat ringan berkipas turboprop adalah sesuai digunakan untuk peperangan melawan gerila kerana ianya jauh lebih murah dari jet pejuang, boleh berperanan sebagai pesawat peninjau, pesawat pejuang, pesawat pengiring disamping mudah dan murah untuk disenggara dan tidak memerlukan landasan terbang yang panjang dan cantik. Kajian mendapati harga untuk 1 jet pejuang boleh membeli 40 pesawat ringan turboprop. Negara maju seperti Amerika Syarikat pun sekarang ini sedang mengkaji untuk mengguna kembali teknologi lama ini dalam era perang gerila dan pencegahan penyeludun serta pengawalan pantai.
Indonesian Air Force Welcomes Anti-Guerrilla Fighter Planes
2 September 2012
Four A-29 Super Tucano fighter planes arrived at East Jakarta's Halim Perdanakusuma Base on Saturday in the first wave of new "counter-insurgency" turboprop fighters purchased as part of the Indonesian Military's (TNI) push to modernize its fleet.
The Super Tucano, a reliable fighter known for its counter-insurgency abilities and low price, will replace the Indonesian Air Force's grounded fleet of ageing OV-10 Broncos. The Indonesian government bought two packages of eight planes each from Brazilian planemaker Embraer for $143 million per package, Air Force deputy chief of staff Air Marshall Dede Rusamsi said.
A second delivery of four Super Tucanos are expected to arrive early next year. A second group of eight more planes will arrive some time after January 2013, he said.
The "anti-guerrilla" Super Tucano can be used for a broad range of missions, including surveillance, air-to-air combat and counter-insurgency actions, Dede said. The Air Force plans to use the planes for pilot training, he added.
The four planes left Embraer's factory in Brazil on Aug. 6 were co-piloted by eight Brazilian pilots. The pilots passed over Spain, Morocco, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Qatar, Oman, India and Thailand before they entered Indonesia and landed in Medan. The entire trip took 54 hours and 35 minutes spread across 14 days, Dede said.
"Before being flown to Indonesia, the four airplanes had undergone [safety] checks, including document clarification, checks of plane components and interiors, as well as test flights involving expert personnel and test pilots from the Indonesian Air Force," Dede said.
Military officials welcomed the planes in a ceremony in East Jakarta on Saturday. They will then be flown to the Air Force's Abdulrachman Saleh base in Malang, where they will be based.
Each of Super Tucano weighs 5.4 tons and can carry up to 1,550 kilograms of weaponry.
Embraer is the world's third largest commercial aircraft manufacturer, behind America's Boeing and Europe's Airbus. In 2010, it sold 101 commercial aircraft and 145 executive jets.
Air power on the cheap
Small, slow and inexpensive propeller-driven planes are starting to displace fighter jets
Sep 20th 2010
JET fighters may be sexy in a Tom Cruise-ish sort of way, but for guerilla warfare—in which the enemy rarely has an air force of his own with which to dogfight—they are often not the tool for the job.
Pilotless drones can help fill the gap. Sometimes there is no substitute for having a pilot on the scene, however, so modern air forces are starting to turn to a technology from the yesteryear of flying: the turboprop.
So-called light-attack turboprops are cheap both to build and to fly. A fighter jet can cost $80m. By contrast the 208B Caravan, a light-attack turboprop made by Cessna, costs barely $2m. It also costs as little as $500 a hour to run when it is in the air, compared with $10,000 or more for a fighter jet. And, unlike jets, turboprops can use roads and fields for takeoff and landing.
Nor is it only jets that light-attack turboprops can outperform. Armed drones have drawbacks, too. The Reaper, made by General Atomics, can cost $10m or more, depending on its bells and whistles. On top of that, a single drone can require a team of more than 20 people on the ground to support it, plus satellite communications. A manned turboprop can bomb an insurgent for a third of the cost of using a drone, according to Pat Sullivan, the head of government sales at Cessna. And there are strategic considerations, too. Many countries' armed forces rely on allies such as America for the expertise and satellite networks needed to run drones. Such allies can let you down in a pinch. Piloted light-attack planes offer complete operational independence—and, being lower-tech than many drones, are less subject to restrictions on exports in the first place.
They are also better, in many ways, than helicopters. To land a chopper safely in the dirt requires sophisticated laser scanners to detect obstacles hidden by dust thrown up by the downdraught of the rotors. On top of this, such dust makes helicopter maintenance even more difficult than it is already. Maintaining turboprops, by contrast, is easy. According to Robyn Read, an air-power strategist at the Air Force Research Institute near Montgomery, Alabama, they can be "flown and maintained by plumbers". Thrush Aircraft, a firm based in Albany, Georgia, is even more expansive. It claims that the Vigilante, an armed version of its cropdusting plane that costs $1m, can be disassembled in the field with little more than a pocket screwdriver.
Turboprops are also hard to shoot down. Air Tractor, another firm that makes cropdusters, branched out into warplanes last year. One reason was that a fleet of 16 unarmed versions of its aircraft had been used by America's State Department to dust South American drug plantations with herbicide—an activity that tends to provoke a hostile response from the ground. Despite the planes' having been hit by more than 200 rounds, though, neither an aircraft nor a pilot has been lost.
In part, this is because of the robust mechanics of turboprops and in part because Air Tractor's fuel tanks have rubber membranes which close around bullet holes to slow leaks. Add extra fuel tanks, which let the plane stay aloft for ten hours, six 225kg precision-guided bombs and more than 2,000kg of missiles, rockets and ammunition for two 50-calibre machineguns, and you have the AT-802U, a formidable yet reasonably cheap (at $5m) warplane.
Light-attack aircraft also now sport much of the electronics used by fighter jets. The MX-15, an imaging device made by L-3 WESCAM, a Canadian company, allows a pilot to read a vehicle's license plate from a distance of 10km. It is carried by both the AT-802U and the AT-6, a top-of-the-range light-attack plane made by Hawker Beechcraft.
Not surprisingly, then, many countries with small defence budgets are investing in turboprops. Places that now fly them, or are expected to do so, include Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco and Venezuela. And the United States. For the biggest military establishment in the world, too, recognises the value of this new old technology. The American air force plans to buy more than 100 turboprops and the navy is now evaluating the Super Tucano, made by Embraer, a Brazilian firm.
In aerial combat, then, low tech may be the new high tech. And there is one other advantage that the turboprop has over the jet, at least according to Mr Read—who flew turboprops on combat missions in Cambodia during the 1970s. It is that you can use a loudspeaker to talk to potential targets before deciding whether to attack them. As Winston Churchill so memorably put it: "When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."
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