By Geoff Fein
Reliability issues with the AQS-20 sonar’s cable winch system aboard the MH-60S Seahawk, have led the Navy to suspend the system’s operational evaluation (OPEVAL) while an independent team reviews the effort.
Last Friday the Navy told lawmakers that it was de-certifying OPEVAL for the Q-20, as it is known. Raytheon [RTN] makes the sonar.
“Although the MH-60S aircraft has demonstrated the ability to accomplish airborne towing missions on numerous occasions, both in developmental and operational test training, as well as during the actual evaluation, several reliability issues previously assessed as resolved have reoccurred,” John Milliman, a Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) spokesman told Defense Daily.
“Several successful flight have been accomplished during the OpEval, which started in March and was scheduled to conclude in May, program officials paused the evaluation pending reevaluation and potential adjustment of procedures and configuration,” he added.
NAVAIR entered OPEVAL for the AQS-20 on March 18 and halted the process on April 18, he said.
The array is to be deployed and towed from the Sikorsky [UTC] MH-60S which will deploy from the Littoral Combat Ship.
NAVAIR is now turning to an independent effort to review the system, Cdr. Spencer Crispell, MH-60S integrated product team co-lead, told Defense Daily.
“What we’ve done, we established a Technical Assist Team which consists of NAVAIR engineers who are going to independently review our system. They are specifically looking at the carriage stream towed recovery system (CSTRS),” he said.
The Technical Assist Team is looking at CSTRS because that is one of the technical challenges the Navy has had with integrating the Q-20 on to MH-60S.
CSTRS enables the Q-20 to go from a carriage position on the left side of the helicopter to a position underwater and towed behind the aircraft, Crispell said.
CSTRS is a common interface that brought together: Sikorsky, Lockheed Martin [LMT], and CTC, an independent, nonprofit, applied research and development professional services organization. CTC is developing CSTRS and Lockheed Martin is developing the common console (Defense Daily, June 23, 2005).
This isn’t the first issue for CSTRS. Back in 2005, the MH-60S suffered a schedule slip of six months in the Initial Operational Capability of the Airborne Mine Countermine (AMCM) mission capability due to problems with CSTRS, according to the Pentagon’s August 15 Selected Acquisition Report (Defense Daily, August 30, 2005).
“Resolution of the issue requires redesign and manufacture of some CSTRS components,” according to the report (Defense Daily, August 17).
The other issue NAVAIR is looking at is the tow cable, the actual cable itself, Crispell said.
“It’s the interface between the Q-20 and the aircraft. Obviously you need to have the cable line up correctly to go onto the winch which is part of the CSTRS, and that’s one of the places where we want to focus some of our efforts,” he added.
“Right now the Technical Assist Team is looking at the issues, [getting] a fresh look from their perspective,” Crispell said. “We expect them to report out in May with their findings, and that point we will be able to [determine] how long of a delay we may be impacted with.”
The MH-60S program office has a risk program office that identifies risks for all parts of the MH-60S, he added.
“Obviously we’ve got risks that are prevalent in all parts of our program,” he said. “There are other things that could potentially become issues, but right now these are things we are focusing our efforts on.”
He added that it is unlikely NAVAIR would change out CSTRS for something else.
“It works, we’ve seen it work. We have had a lot of success with this system,” Crispell said. “What we had problems with were…the reliability of it. Obviously we want it to work well in the fleet, so because of that we want to make sure it is as reliable as can be.”
Although NAVAIR has halted OPEVAL for the Q-20, the service is still conducting testing in other parts of the Organic AMCM, Crispell noted.
“There are five systems that consist of organic airborne mine countermeasures. Those tests are still going on. Its just the Q-20 OPEVAL that stopped,” he said. “It’s not a grounding or anything like that.”