By Ann Roosevelt
As the new Sikorsky [UTX] UH-60M Black Hawk enters the Army inventory, products the helicopter has in common with the CH-47 Chinook and planned for the Block III Apache, both built by Boeing [BA], save the service money and ease the maintenance burden on soldiers, according to an aviation official.
“First, we save money in the process because we buy more of the element, the product, whatever it is,” Col. Neil Thurgood, project manager utility helicopters, told Defense Daily at a recent display of the Mike model Black Hawk at the Pentagon. “And that saves near term costs, and long term logistics cost. The second thing it does, perhaps more importantly is it reduces the burden on our soldiers.”
The first unit of UH-60M Black Hawks will fall under Col. Ronald Lewis, brigade commander of the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault).
Thurgood said, “Now I have a unit commander like Col. Lewis who has Apaches and Black Hawks in the fleet with the same engine. Now he can reduce the workload because he has people who can work on both engines without having different engines on different aircraft. So for our enlisted soldier–which is where my heart and soul lies–it helps our enlisted soldier with the maintenance process.”
Commonalities are not only helpful for enlisted personnel, but also offer commanders more flexibility.
Thurgood said the integrated health management system on M models as well as some L and A model Black Hawks allows fleet management, as data about what happens on each flight– vibrations, how much time on the engine–can be downloaded.
“All that gets fed into our database and our engineers look at it and say okay there’s a high vibration on one element, why did that happen, is it okay, not okay, do we need to replace it,” Thurgood said. “It’s condition-based maintenance. It is really adding combat power to our formations because we’re getting ahead of maintenance. Instead of having a lot of unscheduled maintenance, we try to combine maintenance actions together to save time when the aircraft is down.”
The changes for the new model helicopters, including the digital glass cockpit is important, Thurgood said. “The glass cockpit is very easy to fly. It provides the next leap forward for us in terms of coupled flight, hover in flight, reducing the work load for the pilots…we’re very excited. We have a great team, and there’s been a lot of hard work.”