By Geoff Fein
Although the Navy’s efforts to develop the AH-1Z helicopter are now facing a two-year schedule slip, service officials point out that the UH-1Y just achieved its initial operational capability (IOC) and the first three aircraft are beginning special operations training all in preparation for their first deployment in January 2009.
Yesterday, the first UH-1Y detachment (the first three aircraft), left Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., and reported to its Marine Expeditionary Unit at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Calif., to begin special operations capability training, just weeks after achieving IOC, Col. Keith Birkholz, H-1 program manager, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
The UH-1Y achieved IOC on Aug. 8.
“They will start their work-up period with their first at-sea period in October and then they sail in January ’09, which will be the first UH-1Y deployment ever,” he said.
The Navy’s program of record had been for 100 Bell Helicopter Textron‘s [TXT] UH-1Ys and 180 AH-1Zs. However, Birkholz noted that at the next Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) meeting on Sept. 17, the Navy will present a new program baseline. That baseline will see an increase of 23 UH-1Ys and 46 AH-1Zs, he added, bringing the total to 123 UH-1Ys and 226 AH-1Zs.
“That is a major change to the program, but that is specifically to meet the Marine Corps ‘202K grow the force’ and the fact that the HMLA community is expanding by two additional squadrons,” Birkholz said. The Marine Corps is also converting one of its reserve squadrons into an active duty squadron, he added.
Currently, the Marine Corps has six active duty and two reserve Light Helicopter Attack Squadrons (HMLA).
Birkholz said that as part of the Program Objective Memorandum (POM) 10, Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway is looking to increase the active duty HMLA squadrons to nine and decrease the reserve units to one.
All of the UH-1Ys with the exception of the first one-and-a-half lots (about eight to 10 aircraft), according to Birkholz, will be built new.
The UH-1Y, or Yankee, will replace the three-decade old UH-1N that Marines have been flying since the first helicopter was delivered in 1972 and the last in 1979, he added.
In February, both the UH-1Y and the AH-1Z started operational evaluation (OPEVAL) and both were proceeding on schedule, Birkholz said.
But about April 10, when OPEVAL aircraft were deployed to Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, problems surfaced with the AH-1Z, also known as Zulu, program, Birkholz said.
“At that time the Yankee continued to execute per schedule and finished on time in early May and reported out of test on 27 May,” he said. “However, the Zulu had a series of availability issues. It wasn’t related to any one system or any one subcomponent, so it’s not an easy cut and dry fix. It was a series of small failures that put them behind schedule.”
While the AH-1Z was functioning fine and had completed 50 percent of its OPEVAL …the critical operational issues, the program was starting to lose schedule while the Yankee stayed on schedule, Birkholz explained.
“The head of the Operational Test Force approached myself and my management and said we had two choices–we could continue testing but ‘I will not be able to get you a report in support of your 17 September meeting, which means your milestone will slip into the next fiscal year which has some pretty severe acquisition connotations to it…from a budget standpoint, or we can complete the Yankee, support your budget decision and IOC decision with the Yankee and we will incomplete the Zulu and finish that later and still meet the Zulu IOC which is not until 2011,'” Birkholz said.
Birkholz and his team opted to go ahead and “incomplete” the Zulu’s OPEVAL and complete the Yankee’s OPEVAL.
Birkholz expects to get a full report recommendation on the UH-1Y, which he should sign out this week. “And then we could go to the DAB as scheduled on 17 September and get the contract award this fiscal year.
“If we had slipped into next fiscal year…fiscal year ’09…there would have been some severe acquisition and budgetary consequences. So that was an easy decision for us,” Birkholz said. “Because we had the time to fix the deficiencies on the Zulu and still meet the IOC for it…that’s the genesis of the whole idea of why we split the IOCs and we allowed the operational test force to split the OPEVAL report.”
The AH-1Z, which landed on the Selected Acquisition Reports (SAR) list last week, will now go into a correction of deficiencies phase, Birkholz said.
“About a year from now we will do another full systems developmental test to verify that we corrected all those deficiencies at the system level, and then probably in January or February of 2010 we will do another OPEVAL on the Zulu to complete the testing,” he said. “So the two-year slip reported in the SAR is basically a two-year delay in completion of that one element of the acquisition program baseline (APB), which is OPEVAL complete for the Zulu.”
The Navy had four major issues affecting the AH-1Z, Birkholz said.
One issue was the material availability of the target site system (TSS).
“We reused our engineering manufacturing development test articles. We refurbished them in preparation for this OPEVAL Phase II because we were not going to have production TSS ready,” Birkholz said. “They were production representative, but they were not new production articles.”
These TSS were put on contract in 1999 and delivered in 2001, he noted. And they have been supporting developmental and operational testing for the last seven years. “So they are older articles. I would call them fragile in some cases as far as their ruggedness in being able to deploy.”
“All of the deficiencies and fragile pieces we have discovered over the last seven years have been corrected in the production design, but they were not available for the OPEVAL Phase II as scheduled, because we started training for the OPEVAL Phase II, 10 months ago…last October,” Birkholz said.
He added that the refurbished system worked great, when it worked. “The problem is the system is not operating properly, [that is] you have a mechanical problem with it and you can’t complete the mission.”
Another issue occurred with Thales‘ Optimized Helmet Mounted Sight and Display system (known as TopOwl).
“We had some bore sighting issues. You couldn’t get the helmet and the TSS in the aircraft properly bore sighted and what that basically means is that for the Yankee, which has a less stringent accuracy requirement than the attack platform, the Zulu, the Yankee passed with the existing helmet, with the existing hardware. But the Zulu had some issues with bore sight that had to be corrected,” Birkholz said.
Thales has delivered new helmets with those corrections, he added.
“Its’ already completed its first phase of flight testing, so it was a minor deficiency that didn’t require any major redesign, [it] did not require any contractual actions or negotiations. It was done within the existing contract construct.”
Another issue the Navy had was with the gun control software, which is the aircraft software. Birkholz said this was the third major area that had some minor deficiencies. “But when you add up the material problems with the TSS, you add up the hardware issues with the bore sight on the [Optimized TopOwl], and then the gun control software, over the time from about April 10 to about May 10, while they were supposed to be cranking out all of their ordnance flights out at Yuma, they just had availability issues that they were not making the right progress.”
“That’s why the operational test force commander said we could continue testing but we would miss all of our major milestones and have to restructure the program or we could complete the Yankee, support all [our] major milestones for the Yankee…and come up with a proposal to continue a Low Rate Production status for the Zulu, while we retest and fix these deficiencies and do another OPEVAL to verify [that] all the corrections work,” Birkholz said. “It was a timing issue that basically causes us to incomplete the OPEVAL as scheduled and, because the IOC is not until 2011, we have plenty of time to fix those deficiencies and verify that they work in both the developmental test environment and in an operational test environment and still meet the scheduled IOC for the Zulu.”