By Geoff Fein
With attention focused on the future of Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] presidential helicopter effort, amid rising costs and a Nunn-McCurdy review, the company is nearing completion of the first nine helicopters (Increment I), five of which will be eventually delivered to the White House.
This week, President Obama brought renewed focus on the troubled program when he questioned the need for a new helicopter, adding it is an example of a procurement process “gone amok.”
And Wednesday, Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee, said he wants officials from the Lockheed Martin-Bell Helicopter Textron [TXT]-AgustaWestland VH-71 team along with officials from Sikorsky [UTX], the current presidential helicopter contractor, to testify on continuing the VH-71 program (Defense Daily, Feb, 26).
Even with dark clouds hovering over the program’s future, Lockheed Martin continues to stand by the effort that was developed following the events of 9/11.
“It is challenging. I would say more because there was such an urgent need,” Jeff Bantle, vice president VH-71 for Lockheed Martin, told Defense Daily earlier this week.
“The White House, Lockheed Martin, the Navy…rushed into this program,” he said. “We had a fair understanding of Increment I, but Increment II, we had much less of an understanding.”
Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Andrew Card, then President Bush’s chief of staff, wrote a memo calling for a new presidential helicopter, Bantle said.
“They said the need was so urgent we are going to divide this program into two increments–we need an Increment I because we need a new modern capability very quickly, and then Increment II was the follow up… everything we think we need for the next 30 years in supporting the president…safely and securely…and providing the capability he needs,” he said.
The VH-71 team will deliver nine aircraft under Increment I to the Navy–four of which are test vehicles and five Pilot Production (PP) aircraft. PP-1, however, will remain at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., to become a follow-on test and evaluation aircraft.
Two of the test vehicles are currently at Patuxent River undergoing flight tests. The next two test vehicles will get all the mission systems. Those systems are being installed now at Lockheed Martin’s Owego, N.Y., facility. “They will start flying late this spring early this summer,” Bantle added.
The first three production aircraft are also at Owego. Those aircraft are getting the mission systems, the presidential executive suites, and all the other systems, Bantle said. “They should be flying those about the end of the year.”
The plan was always to deliver four aircraft, Bantle said, but PP-1 will probably eventually be delivered as a production aircraft. “We are discussing that with the Navy as well.”
PP-1 receives a little bit better instrumentation, it’s the first aircraft that gets the full presidential configuration and all the executive accommodations, Bantle said.
“We do a little bit of testing on that, and then the four aircraft after that go to the White House,” he added. “In all likelihood, and this is what we are talking about with the Navy, we can make some very minor modifications to PP-1 and it could be delivered to the White House as well. In all likelihood, that’s what we’ll do.”
That could result in potentially five production aircraft available to the president.
Initial Operational Capability for Increment I is the April-May time frame of 2011, depending on how the program is funded in FY ’10 and beyond, Bantle added.
“Right now we have a plan that we deliver to the HMX squadron…so they would [get their aircraft] in late summer of 2010, and then president would start flying them in spring 2011,” he said. “We are two years from…where they will actually be used by the president.”
The eighth aircraft just made its maiden flight on Feb. 20. It should be delivered to Owego in late March, Bantle said.
The fourth and fifth production helicopters will be coming to Owego over the next 30 to 75 days, he added. “And then we will be all done with the aircraft build.”
“So the aircraft are essentially…even the fifth [one] it’s in the flight hangar…so really the aircraft are essentially built,” Bantle said.
“People forget this. They want to focus on Increment II, but that’s slightly over four years after contract award that all the aircraft are essentially built,” he noted. “I have been on a lot of different programs in my career…that is unusual. Not only are you finished with the design and development, but you are finished with the test vehicle build and production vehicle build, all in four years. That’s pretty amazing.”
But Bantle added that if funding for the program is stretched out, delivery dates to the HMX-1 squadron could be delayed.
Increment 1 is executing and doing quite well, in response to what was considered an urgent need back four to five years ago, Bantle said.
“We are doing the aircraft testing. It has better navigation, a glass cockpit…it’s a modern helicopter compared to the current helicopter. We have 800 flight test hours already in the flight test program. We have about another 1,000 to go, so we will be flight testing for roughly the next two years. Then we will be doing the mission systems,” he said. “The software and avionics, all that lab development, is done. We are at 99 percent done with all the software.”