First Gulf War helicopter engine failures from sand ingestion

Tom notes that during the 1990–1991 Gulf War buildup, Saudi sand sandblasted helicopter engines so severely that engines lasted hours rather than hundreds of hours. The six-month deployment window forced rapid identify-and-solve cycles and helped seed the early-1990s ARPA emphasis on rapid prototyping.

That's collaboration. Collaboration in codes got to be a big deal in the early '90s after the first Gulf War. A couple things came out of the first Gulf War. One was rapid prototyping became a big deal. The war didn't last long enough to do a lot of research for the war. What — a week, two weeks or something? But there were things that were needed once they started flying helicopters over in all the dust in Saudi Arabia. They found that all of a sudden the sand was sandblasting the engines, and they weren't lasting hundreds of hours — just a few hours.

Origin story for the Defense Department's rapid prototyping investment that later became "agile manufacturing." Helicopters abraded in three minutes; engine particle separators developed in field.

The Defense Department became very interested in rapid prototyping. How could you build something? At the time, we were all set for a war in Europe with tanks, or a war in Southeast Asia. We were not set for a war in the desert. The helicopters were failing because they would ingest dust and sand from the desert, and within three minutes they would just abrade away the whole engine. They had to develop things called engine particle separators and stuff. They worked around it, but they realized they were working very fast to solve problems. When you have a buildup that takes six months and a war that only lasts for five days, you don't have a lot of time to prototype or to change things. It took them six months to change things over for a desert war that they weren't prepared for. Fortunately, Saddam couldn't do anything about it in the six months.

Six-month Saudi mobilization revealed helicopters losing engines in 24 hours from sandblasting. Drove development of engine air particle separators (EAPS). Bridge into the EAPS-as-human-nose teaching analogy.

After the first Gulf War — we took six months to mobilize in Saudi Arabia to invade Iraq and beat back Kuwait. Now not every enemy is going to watch you mobilize for six months and wait for you to attack. The first Gulf War lasted either three days or seven days. It's like the Israelis or the Egyptians — it's all over in just a few days once they decided to attack. They needed to mobilize, and they had all kinds of problems. All the helicopters had not been designed to operate in a sandy desert environment. When they got over there and started doing some of their initial stuff, they found the helicopters were losing their engines in twenty-four hours, because you start putting abrasive sand through an engine and it sandblasts itself apart. So they had to develop better engine air particle separators.