By Geoff Fein
The Navy’s decision to go with Rockwell Collins‘ [COL] Common Avionics Architecture System (CAAS) will not only make the service’s CH-53K common with Army helicopters, but it could cut future system upgrade costs, according to a Navy official.
Incorporating CAAS into the CH-53K is part of the Navy’s ongoing effort to move toward open architecture (OA), Capt. Rick Muldoon, CH-53 program manager, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
Open architecture is something Navy aviation program offices are familiar with, Muldoon said.
For example, questions about OA are now part of the acquisition review process that Navy Secretary Donald Winter has implemented.
“It’s mandated now that you focus on OA. You report on how you are proceeding in that regard,” Muldoon said.
Muldoon points to the Sikorsky [UTX] CH-53K’s CAAS cockpit as a good example.
“It fits into what people normally think about, from an architectural perspective,” he said. “Where you’ve got well defined non-proprietary interfaces, where you can do an upgrade to another vendor’s display downstream, with little cost, if you can do the form, fit, function piece of it.”
If the interface is standard, non-proprietary, well understood, something that all of industry works in and the protocols are also non-proprietary, then it can work, he added.
“That’s something Rockwell is very rigorous about in their Common Avionics Architecture System design and that’s why their CAAS design, in my opinion, has proliferated so much,” Muldoon said.
CAAS, according to Rockwell Collins, was originally developed for the MH-47G Chinook and MH-60L/M Black Hawk aircraft.
The Air Combat Electronics (PMA-209) program office is overseeing the Marine Corps’ CH-53K CAAS effort, Muldoon said.
“There are a lot of platforms that are getting that cockpit, and that’s a really good indicator that you have an open architecture when you can put it to other platforms,” he said.
That’s not to say the CH-53K doesn’t have its owns set of unique systems.
“You still have platform unique integration things that you have to deal with…different sizes, different requirements. But [the program office has] been very good at keeping the core of the system common and doing everything modular–that’s been key,” Muldoon said.
As for the rest of the 53K, OA varies greatly. In some cases, such as the airframe, it doesn’t matter, Muldoon said. “Obviously you have to understand the interfaces very well to take a Spirit [Avionics] cockpit and an Aurora [Aviation] airframe component and put them together.”
“[There is] lots of work going on in those interfaces, but those aren’t necessarily in the true sense of open,” he added. “But OA is something we spend a lot of energy on. Again, it’s the guidelines we operate under. It makes sense, because it makes for a more affordable platform for the duration, because you can do those upgrades downstream.”
Muldoon is no stranger to open architecture. He did a lot of work with Goodrich‘s [GR] Integrated Mechanical Diagnostics Health and Usage Management System (IMD-HUMS) that is going on the CH-53E.
“We are putting [it] on the [53]Es to force it into an open realm because that particular community of companies doing diagnostics health and usage monitoring were all very stove piped, proprietary and when we let the requirements for IMD back in ’96 it was OK,” Muldoon said.
At the time, the Navy asked industry representatives not only to take their commercial health and usage monitoring systems and make it work for military application, but to show the services how they were going to make it into an open architecture.
“At the time we really had to educate some of these companies because we were getting ‘what do you mean by open,'” Muldoon said.
“Carnegie Mellon was doing a big thing on OA for OSD and there was an OSD office on OA that I worked very closely with,” he added. “We were able to send them to classes so that all the offerors were able to get a full understanding and bring proposals in that showed us how they are going to migrate to an open architecture, because we can’t afford to do this.”
The Navy wanted to bring in the best of class in each of the capabilities within the HUMS environment, Muldoon said. “Without having to redesign it.”