The Army’s Light Utility Helicopter (LUH), produced by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS), is progressing speedily and well, the program officer said.
The LUH is “very successful, 86 aircraft have been delivered to date,” Col. Neil Thurgood, Army Project Manager for the utility helicopter office, said at the recent Association for the United States Army annual conference in Washington, D.C.
“What’s unique about the program is the speed at which it happened,” he said. “It validates the promise made to National Guard units” to provide them with modern aircraft.
The aircraft come in several configurations; the standard is medical evacuation. They are being fielded about equally to the active duty training and command and control units and the National Guard.
The aircraft has been maintaining a 93 percent operational readiness rate across all the units in the aggregate, he said, and have accrued just over 17,000 hours.
The Army plans to buy about 345 UH-72A Lakota LUH rotorcraft. The standard medical evacuation configuration costs about $5.2 million.
“It’s uniquely tied to the Black Hawk program,” Thurgood said. As the Lakota is fielded to units, it frees up the Black Hawks to go to the fight.
And, on any given day, there are about 400 conventional Black Hawks in the fight, he said.
Also unique is that the LUH is an FAA certified platform. “It’s going to stay an FAA certified platform,” Thurgood said. The Army is learning to maintain and keep the aircraft under standard FAA rules, so they can fly in FAA airspace.
The program has been in continuous production since 2006, according to John Burke, EADS vice president and LUH program manager.
EADS provides training and engineering in Grand Prairie, Texas, and has trained almost 500 pilots and maintainers. On any given day, he said, 250-300 government and EADS personnel are working on the program.
Burke said 15 units are fielded and supported, nearly evenly split between the National Guard and active Army.
The Army has made some tweaks to the Lakota configuration, Thurgood said. For example, medical equipment that was on the floor has moved up on the sidewalls, providing more space on the floor. Some equipment has been added to the nose of the aircraft–for the National Guard, in particular–such as stronger spotlights to help crews better perform their missions.
There’s a “synergistic effect,” on the program, Thurgood said, because the LUH is a military EC-135 helicopter. For example, EADS will fix obsolescence issues on the commercial EC-135, which also transition to the LUH military aircraft.
Thurgood doesn’t see any change in this particular program, because Congress allowed the service to buy the program completely a year or two earlier.
Additionally, with interest in the helicopter from the Navy and some future potential military sales, “I don’t think there’ll be a downward change in the program,” Thurgood said. “[It will] probably drive the numbers up.”