The news and discussion on Turbomeca-HAL dispute on provision of Shakti engines for LUH; set me off on thinking on what would be the commonality of engines for Helicopters for the Largest users and producers of Helis viz., USA and Russia. Accordingly have collected the information on an excel sheet.
If we see the US numbers we can see that only 4-5 powerplants have been repeated across a minimum of 19 helicopters. A number of platforms have been excluded as being variants of the same platform. A similar case is seen with the Russian helicopters. Here my information is severely lacking and the conclusions might be wrong. However it might be safe to assume that commonality of engine across platforms is not a compulsory best practice.
Though the benefits of commonality are obvious, it might be more important to find an engine which is more suited to the need of the platform.
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