None of your helicopter procurement stories measure up to the clusterfuck that happened (and is still happening) here in Canada.
Back in the mid-1980s, our government was looking to replace our then-old Sea King ASW helicopters and Sea Knight SAR helicopters with a common aircraft. A competition was held and the EH101 (now the AW101) won; orders were placed for 50 aircraft, with the aircraft planned to enter service in the mid-1990s. However, the political climate changed (the Cold War ended) and the Conservative government, then in power, was voted out of office. The incoming Liberals, feeling (quite correctly) that the program was way overbudget (the early 1990s saw a series of spending cuts by all levels of government in Canada) cancelled the program, paying $500 million in penalties in the process, with a promise to re-evaluate the needs of the Canadian Forces.
Fast forward to 1998, when it became clear that the Sea Knights were absolutely at the end of their service life and desperately in need of replacement. The government held a hasty competition and ended up buying the CH-149 Cormorant - a scaled-back version of the original AW101 variant we were originally going to buy. At the same time, a number of high-profile incidents with the Sea King fleet hastened their replacement too. The government held another competition and decided to buy a navalised version of the Sikorsky H-92, to be called the CH-148 Cyclone in service, with first deliveries taking place in 2008. The issue here is that despite being the best candidate for the job, the AW101 was denied the contract as it would have been extremely embarrassing for the government to buy the AW101, having cancelled it eight years prior.
So, now it's 2013, and despite assurances from Sikorsky that the aircraft is on it's way, we still haven't had a single Cyclone delivered to the Canadian Forces, and to top it all off,
there have been serious doubts raised about the safety of the basic aircraft in this particular role.
if they change their wing angle, do the mountings of those pods change along, or are the missiles suddenly pointing to the pilot?
Going back a bit, but the mechanism to actuate the pylons is likely rather simple. I don't have any information on the Tornado, but the F-111's pylon system is rather simple:
Basically, the pylons are mounted in swiveling mounts and are connected to the wing box via an actuator rod; as the wings move, the rod very simply keeps the pylons aligned with the airflow.
