By Emelie Rutherford
The trio of contractors vying for the Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR-X) replacement helicopter contract plan to submit feedback to the Air Force this week on the latest amendment to the solicitation, which they expected to received a draft of as soon as last Friday night.
The forthcoming sixth amendment to the CSAR-X request for proposals (RFP) will push the contract award date from July to the fall, realign the funding profile for the new date, and spell out restrictions on the acquisition of special metals, in line with recent statutory changes, Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy said. The official amendment 6 is expected to be issued next week.
Three contractors seeking the CSAR-X development contract submitted their latest proposals in January. Boeing [BA] initially won the contract for 141 aircraft in November 2006. Competitors Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Sikorsky [UTX] twice filed protests with the Government Accountability Office, spurring the Air Force to reopen the competition and the three competitors to submit revised bids.
Lockheed Martin is proposing the HH-71; Sikorsky is bidding its HH-92; and Boeing is offering the HH-47, a version of the Chinook.
Rick Spicer, Boeing’s HH-47 capture team lead, said he expects the contract award to be in the October to November time frame.
“That said, we have no idea what impact the politics of the election and the possible changes in personnel are going to have on that,” he said.
Spicer said the proposal Boeing submitted by the January 2008 deadline “technically was very similar” to the company’s previous proposal from 2006.
“There were some clarifications in wording that we felt were necessary to rectify some areas where we thought we weren’t as clear or precise as we could have been, so that the proposal would be interpreted easier to read,” he said. Boeing’s offer is 85 percent common with the MH-47G that’s flying today, he said.
Spicer maintained the Air Force’s initial CSAR-X competition that Boeing won “was very open, very fair, very balanced, and squeaky clean in the way it was managed.”
He said this time the Air Force is “asking questions about very, very minute details of the proposal, clarifications, and it’s obvious that they are reading every word, and they’re analyzing every word, and that new people are looking at it.”
This time around the Air Force has incorporated more actual warfighters into the evaluation process, said Mike Farage, Sikorsky’s director of Air Force government business development.
“I think [it] is a great thing, because now whatever one they pick, the warfighter has had a chance to look at it and evaluate it, and they’ll live with whatever they choose,” Farage said.
Sikorsky’s latest CSAR-X proposal differs little from its previous 2006 bid, with the most significant alteration being a change in the mix of subcontractors, including enhancing the role Rockwell Collins plays, he said
Another change is Sikorsky’s latest proposal calls for a 40-inch “plug” on the aircraft’s tail intended to enhance performance. In the company’s original proposal, that feature was not set to debut until the aircraft’s Block 10 configuration, instead of in Block 0, Farag said.
He said Sikorsky is sticking to a five-blade aircraft, which he said was in the initial 2006 proposal as well.
“Sikorsky has put a lot of effort into it in the two years since the original contract, allowing us to low risk and down risk things that might have been concerns two years ago,” he said, noting progress in “everything from blade technology to hub technology.” He said sales and flying hours of HH-92s have increased over the past two years as well.
Dan Spoor, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for CSAR-X, said his company has “worked very hard over the last year and a half to have a team of people execute on every issue that the Air Force might have identified as a concern, to focus on removing risks.”
A change between in Lockheed Martin’s 2006 and 2008 CSAR-X bids is the engine–which Spoor said was previously slated to be a 3,000-shaft-horsepower engine and now is planned as a 2,500-shaft-horsepower version. He said testing has shown the 2,500-shaft-horsepower engine will deliver needed performance.
Spoor said the main difference between Lockheed Martin’s proposed HH-71 and aircraft the RAF flies in Iraq is basically the design of the doors and windows.
“Everything on that platform from a basic aircraft is in existence and flying,” he said.
Spoor said he understands the CSAR-X amendment 6 was driven by the amount of time it takes the Air Force to complete the reviews they need to do before the selection.
“I think of that as just an extension of the discussion that this is a very thorough rebid,” he said.
Industry representatives said they expect the amendment 6 RFP to be officially released next week, when the service is also expected to conduct interim reviews with the bidders on the fifth amendment.
Cassidy said that as “a result of the interim evaluation briefing, each offeror will receive a face-to-face debriefing of the full results of their individual evaluation relative to the RFP evaluation criteria.”
“This debrief will include all elements of the mission capability, proposal risk, past performance, and cost/price factors and will be based upon the Air Force’s evaluation of the offerors’ proposals and their answers to the Air Force’s evaluation questions to date,” she said.
In addition to providing the offerors with the results of the evaluation of their proposal to date, she said the service hopes the bidders “will be able to use this information to improve the value of their offering to the warfighter within the RFP evaluation criteria mentioned above.”
Cassidy said the CSAR-X evaluation criteria has “remained essentially unchanged.”
Changes that have been made include the addition late last year–in Amendment 5–of a certification that all critical technologies have been demonstrated in a relevant environment before entry into System Development and Demonstration phase, she said.
Also, Amendment 4 added a new model to capture the potential maintenance manpower cost efficiencies of the various aircraft, she said.