December 16, 2024 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
May 22, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval
Navy Awards Sikorsky $1.13B for Next 12 CH-53K Heavy-Lift Helicopters
By: Megan Eckstein
The Department of the Navy awarded Sikorsky a $1.13-billion contract for 12 CH-53K King Stallion heavy-lift helicopters, the Defense Department announced on Friday.
The contract to the Lockheed Martin-owned company covers Lots 2 and 3 of the helicopter, which will replace the aging CH-53E Super Stallion. The Navy plans to buy 200 CH-53Ks over the life of the program.
This award comes after an overhaul of the helicopter's test program, which had fallen behind due to inefficiencies in the test plan and technical problems in the design of the aircraft. Those problems included an exhaust gas reingestion problem in the helo's three-engine design. A recent Pentagon Selected Acquisition Report noted 126 design deficiencies, Bloomberg has reported, and the Department of the Navy has since worked with Sikorsky to restructure the remaining test program.
After cost growth in the Lot 1 contract for the helicopters, the Navy and Marine Corps reduced this contract to 12, compared to a previous plan to buy 14 under Lots 2 and 3.
“The aircraft quantity was negotiated for 12 vice 14 aircraft due to cost growth identified during Lot 1 production as well as the cost of incorporating the correction of known technical deficiencies that have resulted from developmental flight test to date,” Navy spokesman Capt. Danny Hernandez told USNI News.
“The lower quantity will allow the program to afford the aircraft while preserving planned support efforts within the budget and program schedule.”
In a Friday news release, Navy and Marine Corps leadership expressed confidence in the program despite the challenges it has faced over the past year or so.
“The Marine Corps is very appreciative of the efforts by the Navy and our industry partners to be able to award the LRIP 2/3 contract,” Lt. Gen. Steven Rudder, the deputy commandant for aviation, said in a news release.
“This is a win for the Marine Corps and will secure the heavy-lift capability we need to meet future operational requirements and support the National Defense Strategy. I'm very confident in the success of the CH-53K program and look forward to fielding this critical capability.”
“This contract award reflects close cooperation and risk sharing between the Government and industry teams to deliver critical capabilities to the Marine Corps,” James Geurts, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, said in the release.
“Working with our industry partners, the team ensured that solutions for technical challenges are incorporated into these production aircraft. This reflects the urgency to ensure we deliver capabilities necessary to support the Marine Corps and the Department of Navy's mission, while continuing to drive affordability and accountability into the program.”
In a House Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this spring, Daniel Nega, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for air programs, told lawmakers on the tactical air and land forces subcommittee that the upcoming contract would put the onus on Sikorsky to address remaining design flaws and fix any other problems that come up during the remainder of testing.
“The flight envelope's been tested to the corners; Gen. Rudder talked about how we've sort of wrung it out,” he said at the hearing.
“There's a relatively low risk that anything major will be found. However, if nuisance issues come along, we are not going to give those nuisance issues to the Marines, and the Navy and Marine Corps team is not going to accept the full risk of that. So the risk concurrency between the development and the production, that overlap is going to be taken care of.”
Asked how the contract awarded today would do that, Hernandez told USNI News that “the production contract is structured to ensure a deployable configuration is delivered for fleet use. All known issues are included in the contract, additionally the contract provides provisions for any new issues discovered during flight testing. This will ensure appropriate shared risk between the government and industry.”
Sikorsky's Path Forward
Despite the ongoing technical challenges with the helicopter design and the delays in the test program – which has set back the planned start of initial operational test and evaluation but does not appear to threaten the planned first deployment of the helicopter in 2023 or 2024 – Sikorsky officials remain confident that the aircraft is on the right path following last year's restructure.
“The majority of the technical issues that we've discovered over the 1,400 hours of flight test, nothing too terribly different than we would expect to find on a development program,” Bill Falk, Sikorsky's program director for CH-53K, told USNI News in an interview earlier this month.
“The majority of them are already resolved, already proven and demonstrated in aircraft. We do have a set of issues that we still are in the process of resolving and demonstrating, but we've got a plan in place, parts installing in the aircraft and flight test plans to demonstrate that.”
Falk said the company has dedicated one of its six test aircraft to tackle the exhaust gas reingestion issue, spending the last four or five months using computer-aided modeling and data from test flights to develop prototype solutions and test them out on the aircraft.
“We have enough data that we now understand what solution we need to install on the aircraft, demonstrate and validate, which will become part of the production solution,” Falk said.
“So we are at a completely different spot: where there was uncertainty four to five months ago, we have complete confidence now.”
The new test plan is also more focused than the original one, tying each flight test to the delivery of a specific capability rather than just flying for flying's sake, Falk told USNI News. The helicopter has already demonstrated that it meets or exceeds all requirements for speed, range, altitude, lift capacity and more. Sikorsky and the Navy/Marine Corps team have also conducted hot weather and brownout condition testing in Arizona, and they have certified the helicopter can be transported via C-5 and C-17 cargo planes.
A key upcoming test will be sea trials, where the CH-53K will have to prove it can fly on and off a flight deck and that Marines can maintain it at sea.
Falk said the Navy is looking at a window of late February or early March through May of 2020 for sea trials, and that the tests will take place aboard a yet-to-be-decided amphibious assault ship.
Initial operational test and evaluation is set to begin in early 2021, which would allow the Marine Corps to declare initial operational capability in time for the first deployment in 2023 or 2024.
Though work still remains to be done, Paul Fortunato, director of Marine Corps business development at Sikorsky, and John Rucci, the company's senior experimental test pilot for the CH-53K, said the new helicopter has already proven it is easier to operate and maintain than its predecessor and that its warfighting capability surpasses the requirements for the aircraft.
Rucci said pilots have total trust in the fly-by-wire cockpit, which essentially lands the helicopter on its own – meaning the pilots can focus on the mission at hand or evading a threat, or can safely land in a sandstorm or other degraded conditions.
And Fortunado said the helo was built with easy maintenance in mind: fewer tools are required, the all-electronic maintenance documents include graphics that maintainers can zoom in on and rotate to help them maintain or repair parts, the logistics footprint is smaller and easier for deployments aboard amphibious ships. The design even includes putting electronic components in “backwards,” meaning the connections are facing outwards and easily accessible when maintainers take off a panel, instead of the wiring being in the back like usual and requiring a Marine to use a mirror to see what is going on behind the component.
At Marine Corps Air Station New River in North Carolina, Falk said, Marines are using one of the system demonstration test article (SDTA) helicopters to work out any remaining issues in the maintenance manuals and to start learning more about how to fix and sustain the new helo.
“There's Marines crawling around that aircraft, taking it apart, putting it back together again, running the maintenance procedures, and basically using what we developed in order for them to be able to maintain the aircraft,” Falk said.
“So the opportunity for us before we start delivering production aircraft, we can learn from that, we can feed all that back, we can improve our maintenance procedures and basically when the aircraft is deployed deliver a much higher-quality, more efficient set of maintenance instructions. Plus, you've got Marines that have already used it, done it, learned.”
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June 19, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Northrop to build 3D-printed scramjet engine for Raytheon hypersonic weapon
By: Valerie Insinna LE BOURGET, France — Raytheon has partnered with Northrop Grumman on its air-breathing hypersonic weapon, which will be powered by a Northrop-made scramjet made entirely of 3D-printed parts, the company announced Tuesday. Raytheon and Northrop's weapon is one of the competitors in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's HAWC project, short for Hypersonic Air-Breathing Weapon Concept. The companies' offering — which comprises Northrop's scramjet engine and Raytheon's air vehicle — is ready to make its first flight, said Tom Bussing, vice president of Raytheon's advanced missile system segment. “We have a flight test planned for the near future where we will begin flying this particular class of weapon system,” he said during a briefing at Paris Air Show. While the exact schedule is classified, Bussing noted that the companies have already conducted “significant” ground tests “The combustor, everything that we do now is done by additive manufacturing, so its driving affordability into the hypersonic boost missile's scramjet engine. We are also looking at ways to reduce the weight so we can have more fuel, more payload,” he said. The entirety of Northrop's scramjet is 3D printed using advanced materials, said John Wilcox, the company's vice president of advanced programs and technology. “There gets to be points where you have to weld additive manufactured parts, but right now even the full combustor [is printed],” he said. “We think we're the first to ever 3D print a full combuster for an air-breathing scramjet engine. That's what's going to drive the affordability for air-breathing scramjet missiles.” According to Raytheon, scramjet engines use high vehicle speeds to then compress air moving into its inlets before combusting it. The process allows a vehicle to maintain hypersonic speeds — more than five times the speed of sound — over longer periods of time. The Raytheon-Northrop team is competing against Lockheed Martin for the final HAWC contact. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/paris-air-show/2019/06/18/northrop-to-build-3d-printed-scramjet-engine-for-raytheon-hypersonic-weapon/
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September 13, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Massive simulation shows the need for speed in multi-domain ops
FORT BENNING, Ga. – The Army tested its current and future equipment and warfighting methods for the potential next war in a massive, weeks-long simulated experiment that wrapped up recently. The Unified Challenge 19.2 experiment in August involved more than 400 participants working with 55 formations, 64 concepts and 150 capabilities, said Col. Mark Bailey, chief of the Army's Futures and Concepts Center's Joint Army Experimentation Division. The exercise ran Aug. 5-23. The simulation allowed Army leaders to “understand some of the complex patterns” that come out of the very complex systems that the United States and its adversaries are using, or developing to use, in future scenarios, Bailey told reporters this week. Much of what was tested couldn't be done in the real world because it hasn't been invented yet. For example, the Army's priorities in the Cross Functional Teams, from Future Vertical Lift to the Next Generation Combat Vehicle, are years away from fielding their platforms to the force, but through mathematical models and algorithms, researchers can plug in the day and play out a very detailed set of events. And the scope of the experiment dove deeper than what a typical tabletop exercise or wargaming scenario might. It allowed experimenters to see down to the small unit level and all the way up to the division and corps level what would likely play out if those formations collided with a near-peer competitor on foreign turf in a battle for territory. Chris Willis, the chief of the Maneuver Battle Lab's Model and Simulations Branch, said that for the first time, experimenters were able to use “nonlethal effects” in a simulation — electronic jamming, cyber-attacks and other methods — to support maneuver warfighting. That helped them gather data on concepts that Army leaders have been considering and theorizing about for years. But the multi-domain operations tools that were used in simulation were not being flung about the simulated battle space by random privates. Currently, the experiments look at having commanders below the brigade level aware of what MDO tools are at their disposal and how to get access to them when needed from higher echelons, which would likely house them. “The brigade would get access to some effects but those wouldn't rest inside of the brigade proper,” said Col. Chris Cassibry, director of the Maneuver Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate's Concepts Development Division. Cassibry emphasized that at this stage it's more important for the brigade commander to understand what's happening across the battlefield and use those effects to execute maneuver. For instance, the idea is that by enabling space and cyber assets, ground forces can have more freedom to maneuver. That was assumed to be the case but the complex simulation has put some data behind the concept for researchers to now analyze. A lot of what presented challenges that will consume commanders of the future was creating “windows of domain superiority,” Bailey said. Converging effects The basic plan is to converge effects, fires or non-kinetic or other types, which create that window. Commanders can plan for that and they do. But to do that at the speed that leaders believe MDO will unfold presents a whole other set of challenges. “Things happen so fast you must have this flexibility to do that in a moment's notice so that when you identify a target on a battlefield and don't have the artillery tube in range you have to quickly identify what else you have in range to hit that target,” Bailey said. And also, to understand that even if you switch “guns” quickly enough to another asset, drone, missile, electronic warfare, that means the new tool you've chosen will now not be used on another quickly emerging target or threat. That's where artificial intelligence must fill the gap, by offering up those menus of options for commanders and identifying the targets so that the human can then fire. Unified Challenge is a twice a year event; this was the second. Though it provides a lot of data, it's not something easily replicable. That means that in the near term, smaller experiments will unfold using some of the lessons learned from the larger experiment, further refining concepts and next steps on many of the ways in which the Army goes after MDO. The next step will be for the Futures and Concepts Center to compile a report of lessons learned and recommendations moving forward with some of the platforms, capabilities and doctrine. That will be delivered to the center director in the coming months, and once approved, spread across the Army to inform smaller scale experiments with portions of the larger effort to develop MDO doctrine and materiel, Bailey said. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/09/12/massive-simulation-shows-the-need-for-speed-in-multi-domain-ops