By Michael Sirak

The Air Force is committed to ensuring that none of the three of the industry teams vying to supply its next-generation rescue helicopter will view itself at a competitive disadvantage as the contest moves ahead, the service’s top acquisition official said yesterday.

“We want to make sure that everyone feels that they are being treated in a fair way,” Air Force Acquisition Executive Sue Payton told reporters during a meeting in her Pentagon office Oct. 4. She was discussing the service’s plan for the Combat Search and Rescue Replacement Vehicle (CSAR-X) program and resolving a standing legal impasse with two of these industry teams that began in 2006.

Boeing [BA] last November won the rights to supply the 141 new rescue helicopters that the Air Force wants to acquire before the end of next decade under the multi-billion-dollar CSAR-X program. The Chicago-based company offered the HH-47, a variant of the tandem-rotor Chinook.

But the two losing teams led by Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Sikorsky [UTX] lodged protests on two occasions since then that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) upheld. The first round of sustained protests centered on how the Air Force calculated cost data in its evaluation of the three bids; the second round focused on how the Air Force intended to resolve the cost issue (Defense Daily, Feb. 27 and Sept. 4).

As a result of the GAO’s most recent ruling, the Air Force has agreed to reopen the competition and accept new data across the board — as opposed solely to cost information — from the competitors.

“We have opened up all areas for the offerors to propose to us anything they would like in cost, non-cost, technical, past-performance, ways they will mitigate risk,” Payton said.

Reigning champ Boeing has expressed concerns that it may now find itself at a disadvantage. The reason, company officials have said, is that Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky may have received competition-sensitive data on Boeing’s proposal when the Air Force debriefed them, per federal acquisition regulations, on why they did not prevail in the original source selection.

Payton said these separate debriefs to Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky focused on the respective weaknesses of their own bids. Lockheed Martin bid the US101 helicopter as part of the Team US101 consortium. Sikorsky proposed the HH-92.

“We have told Boeing that if they believe that any of their proprietary competition-sensitive data has been disclosed, then they need to tell that to us,” she said.

But to mitigate such concerns, Payton said the Air Force plans to host equal information disclosure (EID) briefings for each of the three teams after its issues the draft version of the revised CSAR-X solicitation. This draft document, which will contain an amendment with the changes to the scope of the contest, is expected later this month, possibly between Oct. 15 and Oct. 20, she said.

“We are setting up a time right after we post the draft to call in each of the offerors and to describe to them — give an equitable playing field — about what everyone else was briefed,” she said. “That is a thing that you do after a GAO finding.”

“So we believe,” she continued, “and having talked to our contracting people and our lawyers, that the playing field will be level based on [the] information [provided] to all of the parties.”

Further, Payton said, the Procurement Integrity Act stipulates that “anything that has been given to lawyers during the GAO review is also under protective order [so] that it cannot be shared with anyone in the company that is working the proposals.”

Nonetheless, she said, if any of the competitors still believes that there has been a disclosure of competition-sensitive data, “then they need to give us their finding and we will go investigate the specific.”

To date, she said she has received no such specifics indicating a breach.

Payton said the Air Force hopes to issue the final version of the revised solicitation in early November after having had constructive dialogue with the three offerors on the draft. From there, the service would like to have the competitors turn in their new proposals before the Christmas holiday, she said.

Announcing the winner is projected around May, Payton said.

“We are not going to rush to award,” she said. “We are going to do this as rapidly as possible, balancing the fact that we need to really have more feedback sessions than we had during the original source selection.

“Industry will understand where they stand relative to their most probable lifecycle costs and all of their weaknesses and all of their strengths as we get to the point where they make their final offer into us.”

Payton said the Air Force still desires having the first unit of CSAR-X helicopters in the field in FY ’12, but “if you count what the day-to-day slip has been, we are looking more like FY ’14.”

“We would be very impressed with anybody who would come in close to that [original fielding] date,” she noted. “Again, industry is going to drive, based on what they have been investing in, if we can come close to FY ’12.”

“But,” she continued, “I have read a lot through the media, that these companies think they can still meet the [original] IOC date. And we, the government, are not going to force them into a later date, but we will say the no-later-than date that we would like to get there is FY ’14.”

She said the service remains fiscally constrained in its acquisition portfolio, so it is not realistic to expect that it will be able to buy more of the new helicopters each year than it had projected for the original competition.

“I have no hope that we will have any more money that we could buy more in any given year,” she said.

Payton said the schedule for moving ahead with the CSAR-X program and the overall strategy is predicated on the feedback that the Air Force receives from John Young who has been nominated to become the Pentagon’s new acquisition czar.

“I have a way ahead that the Air Force would like, but the details and the specifics we definitely need to bounce off him,” she said. “He is a brilliant guy. He will have all kinds of great ideas and so I definitely want to make sure that is covered.”

Payton also made it clear that the requirements for the new rescue helicopters will not change in the forthcoming solicitation. Nor will the evaluation criteria.

“None of that changes,” she said. “What really changes is the ability for the offerors to give us past-performance data that might have improved, give us improved components. Maybe they have made a breakthrough on some component.”

The extent to which each offeror changes its proposal is “totally up to industry,” she said.

The Air Force has invited officials from the Army and Navy to participate in the new source selection, Payton said.

“I am very pleased we have great support from the Army and the Navy,” she said. “We are doing some cross fertilization here to get the best expertise. They have excellent domain knowledge in helicopters. They have excellent domain knowledge in acquisition.”