HUNTER ARMY AIRFIELD, Ga.–Boeing [BA] is validating a new floor for the CH-47 Chinook helicopter called the Cargo On Off Logistics System, or COOLS, a company official said.
COOLS would replace the current floor on the CH-47F, and includes rapidly reconfigurable flip-over rollers, a pallet locking system and sub-floor ballistic protection. It is similar, but not the same as the floor on a C-17 aircraft.
“We’re test flying COOLS because it’s a new floor, because it’s different, and we’re validating that it doesn’t make anything shake, or act differently than the floor we had before,” Patrick Donnelly, director of U.S. and Foreign Military Sales Chinook programs at Boeing, told Defense Daily in an interview.
The rollers reduce the aircrew workload and allow rapid reconfiguration for a variety of missions. “COOLS will make it so much easier and save time,” he said. Using the smooth floor, the Chinook can deliver soldiers to a mountain, then flipping the rollers over, they can load up hardware. Now, without rollers it’s possible that soldiers can hurt their backs wrestling heavy pallets.
Donnelly said the validation flights involve an instrumented aircraft flying at different gross weights. The new floor with ballistic panels underneath adds weight, so officials want to make sure the vibration levels are acceptable. Vibration is not only hard on the aircrew but increases component fatigue on the aircraft.
“It’s taken about a year and a half to do,” Donnelly said, working to make it happen. COOLS was certainly one of the number one wishes from Chinook crews from after action reviews.
The floor was also mentioned by deployed aviators when asked by the Army project manager Cargo Helicopters office (Defense Daily, Jan. 20).
The new COOLS floor is built for Boeing by United Technologies [UTX], previously Goodrich before it was purchased by United Technologies, at its North Dakota plant.
Next, the Army will verify what Boeing has done, test it on a Fox-model Chinook and then be ready to make the decision to go ahead and field it.
“The government would order kits from Boeing, as it wants to retrofit the floor to units in the field, and then put the floor in the production line in 2015,” Donnelly said.
Boeing has explored putting such a floor on other company platforms, but “it would not be a plug and play redesign,” Donnelly said. It looked into putting it on the V-22, for example, but Special Operations Forces were not interested.