COBI Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk Set 5906

COBI's Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk is a 1:32 model built from 928 blocks, 54 cm long, produced under licence from Sikorsky. The rotors turn, the side doors slide, the stabilisers move, and an American pilot figure is included with an M240 machine gun matching the one mounted in the real aircraft. A block separator is supplied to make assembly easier.

Built on the assumption that it will crash

The Black Hawk replaced the Huey, and the requirement that shaped it came out of Vietnam, where a great many helicopter crew died in survivable impacts.

The US Army specified that occupants had to survive a vertical impact at 38 feet per second — roughly falling off a three-storey building — without serious injury. Almost nothing about the airframe makes sense without that number.

The landing gear is designed to collapse in stages, absorbing energy rather than transmitting it. The seats stroke downward on guides as the floor rises. The fuel tanks are self-sealing, crash-resistant and mounted away from the cabin. The main rotor blades have titanium spars and can keep flying after being hit by a 23 mm shell. The whole machine is 4.5 metres tall on the ground but was built to fit inside a transport aircraft with the rotor head folded.

It worked. The Black Hawk's survivability record is the reason it has been in production since 1979, serves with more than twenty countries, and is still being built.

The name

American military helicopters are named after Native American leaders and peoples — Apache, Chinook, Kiowa, Lakota. Black Hawk was a Sauk war leader who fought the United States in Illinois in 1832. The convention dates back to the Army's aviation branch in the 1940s and continues today.

Specifications

Pieces: 928 · Figures: 1 pilot with M240 · Scale: 1:32 · Licensed by Sikorsky · Block separator included
Model dimensions: 54 × 16 × 37 cm (21.3 × 6.3 × 14.6 in)