For the Navy to deploy both a MH-60 R and S squadron aboard the USS John Stennis (CVN-74), officials had to demonstrate the helos could interoperate with the rest of the carrier strike group (CSG), a service official said.
That need for interoperability led the MH-60 multi-mission helicopter program office to upgrade the Romeo and Sierra variants with Link 16, Capt. Dean Peters, H-60 program manager, told sister publication Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“We had quite a bit of motivation to get Link 16 on [those helicopters]. It wasn’t part of the program. That was an upgrade that we put on R and S. The architecture we had within that common cockpit is what allowed us to incorporate it,” Peters said. “You have to have flexibility within the displays, flexibility within your processing capability, in order to incorporate this type of information.”
Both the Sikorsky [UTX] MH-60 R and S have Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] single board processor.
Incorporating Link 16 onto the MH-60s did require some work, Peters noted.
“We did have to buy the MIDS (Multi-functional Information Distribution System) terminal and incorporate that into our avionics racks on the aircraft, so there was hardware change associated with that,” he said. “We did an engineering change proposal. We put that in the aircraft last spring. The development piece of that was in regard to the software, just being able to retrieve all the information available, package it for display, and being able to take the information that is available on your aircraft and put it into the message set that’s available on Link 16 for transmittal. That was really the major upgrade.”
The upgrades as well as Link 16 are not integrated into the MH-60R production line, Peters said.
For the MH-60S, the upgrades were part of a kit, he said. The MH-60S has provisions for both an armed helo kit and the Link 16 kit as well as all the other self defense equipment and upgrades that are going onto the helicopter, Peters added.
There is not a kit in every aircraft, but almost, he noted. “The fleet decides how they want to distribute those kits within their squadrons.”
The Navy is producing the MH-60S in three blocks. Block one is the basic aircraft. Block two brings the mine countermeasures capability to the fleet. Block three brings the armed helo and Link 16 kits, Peters said.
“We have incorporated provisions for block two and three in all of our aircraft,” he said. “We are still in the testing environment for block two. We are not ready to field that capability yet.”
The program office finished the armed helo testing, Peters said. “We’ve just been through a milestone review for a full-rate production decision. We got ‘thumbs up’ from ASN RDA. We are going to start procuring those kits. We’ve bought some already at a limited rate. Now we are going to have the ability to buy the remainder of the kits that will be outfitted on 60S.”
Not every MH-60S will get the armed helo kit, he noted. The first 49 aircraft (out of a total buy of 274) will be for combat logistics only.
“It would be cost prohibitive to retrofit and put those on those first 49,” Peters said. “But the rest of the 274 will be available for armed helo kit integration.
“We have already begun it. We declared IOC in June ’07. We put the kits out there in the training command. They started operating with them. [They have had] tremendous success with Hellfire missile shots,” Peters added.
That capability was critical to being able to deploy the MH-60S on the Stennis in January. That deployment marked the first time there were two helo squadrons aboard a carrier, Peters said.
Besides the addition of the armed helo and Link 16 kits, the integrated testing regimen also aided in quickly getting the MH-60s to the Stennis, Peters said.
“We have a pre-planned product improvement program. We were able to send the first Rs to detachment already with an upgrade, and the S, [with] the Link 16 upgrade. It’s a huge multiplier for the battle group. It brings tremendous situational awareness to the aircraft,” he said.
The addition of Link 16 also enables the MH-60s to be on the network and therefore share the battle group picture with the ships and other aircraft in the CSG, Peters added.
“What we did with our integrated test concept, instead of going through the traditional contractor test, developmental test, operational test, we got buy in up front,” Peters said. “We have a proven airframe. The changes we are putting in are not something that are going to cause the aircraft to come falling out of the sky. These are enhancements, so we wanted to get our operational testers in there early with the developmental testers. And they became comfortable with the system enough that we were able to put it out into the fleet for training purposes.”
The integrated test effort enabled the Navy to get Link 16 out to the fleet at least a year ahead of a traditional development program or even an upgrade program, Peters said.
“[That’s a] huge success story for us. It required flexibility on behalf of COMOPTEVFOR (Commander Operational Test and Evaluation Force) and DOTE (Director Operational Test and Evaluation),” he added.