By Geoff Fein
Issues with the Navy’s MH-60S Airborne Mine Countermeasures (AMCM) system has led to a two-year delay in the program and landed the effort on the Pentagon’s Selected Acquisition Reports (SAR) for this reporting period.
But the Navy points out that the Sikorsky [UTX] MH-60S, or Sierra, is working just fine. Roughly 120 are deployed conducting missions on a daily basis, Cmdr. Spencer Crispell, MH-60S integrated product team co-lead, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“We have good success with the aircraft. It’s currently performing combat support and armed helicopter missions in the fleet,” he said.
In April the Navy took the MH-60S out of operational evaluation for Raytheon‘s [RTN] AQS-20 due to problems with the cable winch system.
According to Crispell, the Navy was seeing reliability issues with the system and didn’t want to send it out into the fleet. An Independent Technical Assist Team (ITAT) made up of Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) engineers were brought in to examine the program and make recommendations for a path forward, Crispell said.
“They looked at the design fundamentals, system reliability, maintainability, safety and crew workload. They made their recommendations to us [and] at the [end] of May to PMA- 299…the H-60 program office,” he said. “PMA-299 completed its analysis, prioritized the recommendations, and we’ve recommended a course of action to provide an effective and suitable AMCM weapon system that satisfies budget and schedule constraints.”
Although reliability issues stopped the AQS-20’s OPEVAL, Crispell pointed out that he has seen the AQS-20 and the integration of AMCM work on the MH-60S.
“We have had success both in training, developmental, and in operational tests,” he said. “As a matter of fact we have accrued more than 350 hours of tow time on the H-60S. I’ve seen this work, it’s worked well as a matter of fact.”
All the same, Crispell acknowledges that the Navy did see “some reliability concerns that we did not want to field with. Therefore we asked the [ITAT] to look at our system.”
During OPEVAL, there were several issues identified, Crispell noted. One was an un-commanded tow hook release, a cable winch broke, a common console video playback froze-up, and there was a power distribution failure, along with some other issues with the tow cable, he added.
Some of the recommendations the ITAT made were:
- Increase the cable diameter of the secondary guide winch cable; and
- Upgrade some software to prevent video playback from freezing-up.
The MH-60S program also incorporated some lessons learned into its maintenance and light procedures, Crispell added.
“We shortened the tow cable length to allow more for margin on the winch drum to help prevent cable over wrapping,” he said. “We also are…combining two winch pendants, which are basically the hand controllers that allow the crew man in the back to control the primary and secondary guide winch. We are combining those two pendants into one pendant. [It will] make it easier for the interface to occur between the air crewman and the carriage stream tow recovery systems (CSTRS).”
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).
“We are taking the time to make the changes the ITAT recommended and then we will verify that those corrections actually worked in what we call verification of correction of deficiencies, sometimes called a VCD. Then we will return to operational test,” Crispell said. “Right now, we are still engaged in determining the final cost of this effort, but we will get done.”
In the meantime, the program will apply the funding budgeted for the completion of OPEVAL to the engineering work required to address the AMCM system reliability issues, he added.
Crispell added that some of the fixes have been completed. “There is an associated timeline with each one of the items.”
The program also received a break by a delay in the Littoral Combat Ship’s (LCS) schedule. The MH-60S will operate from LCS to conduct mine countermeasure and anti-submarine warfare operations.
But that is not to say the MH-60S can’t be operated from other Navy ships, he added. “It is deployed on all types of different ships, on combat logistic force (CLF) ships [and] it’s going to be deployed on aircraft carriers beginning in January ’09. I believe it is the USS Stennis (CVN-74).”
“The 120 or so aircraft we have deployed right now are on all different variants of ships,” Crispell added.
“The aircraft has performed very well out in the fleet in its missions on a daily basis,” Crispell said. “The reliability issues that we have seen in operational tests, and training before that, have not had any impact whatsoever on the fleet’s ability to do its missions out there right now.”