By Marina Malenic
The Air Force has revived plans to purchase a new combat rescue helicopter, with its efforts now focused on procuring a far less costly platform than initially expected, the service’s senior uniformed official said yesterday.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said the Pentagon leadership is now fully behind a plan to replace the Air Force’s aging Sikorsky [UTX] HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters. Defense Secretary Robert Gates last year cancelled the combat search-and-rescue (CSAR-X) fleet replacement program and asked the joint staff to reexamine the requirement for a new platform.
“The path that we are on is less focused on a new development than it is on using readily available off-the-shelf capabilities,” said Schwartz, who was speaking at event sponsored by the Air Force Association.
The Pentagon last week issued an initial request for information (RFI) to industry.
The new plan, outlined on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site, calls for a contract award in 2012. The Air Force wants eight new helicopters ready to deploy by late 2015, but the RFI indicates no timeline for replacing all of the approximately 100 HH-60Gs in the fleet.
Specifications for the new aircraft include the ability to fly about 500 miles round trip without refueling and to reach a sustained speed of at least 143 mph, according to the document.
A rescue variant of Boeing‘s [BA] HH-47 Chinook was chosen by the Air Force for the CSAR-X contract award in 2006, but the Government Accountability Office found fault with the service’s evaluation methodology. Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Sikorsky had also bid for the contract.
Schwartz said the Air Force is most interested in acquiring airframes already in the Pentagon’s inventory in order to keep maintenance costs low.
“At the strategic level, more commonality is better,” he said.