USMC's Huge New CH-53K King Stallion Helicopter Has Not So Tiny Problems, Faces More Delays - New CH-53K King Stallion 2.jpg ...

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The U.S. Navy says it's not sure when the U.S. Marine Corps will be able to
declare initial operational capability with their new Sikorsky CH-53K King
Stallion helicopters due to technical issues. The CH-53K program already has a
long history of delays and these new developments threaten to again push back
the Marines’ plans to replace their increasingly old and troublesome CH-53E
Super Stallion fleet.

Vertical Magazine got the latest status update on the CH-53K program as of
January 2019. Bloomberg was the first to report that new problems had emerged in
the helicopter’s development in December 2018. The Marine Corps had taken
delivery of its first King Stallion in May 2018.

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To add insult to injury, NAVAIR and Sikorsky had both indicated these
long-standing issues had gotten resolved in 2016. Ahead of the delivery of the
first helicopter in 2018, the Marine Corps had also publicly dismissed another
Bloomberg report that said the service was aware of over 1,000 remaining
deficiencies that still needed to get fixed.

“You saw the CH-53K fly,” U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Hank Vanderborght, the
service’s CH-53K program manager, said to reporters after a demonstration at the
Berlin Airshow in April 2018. “Did it look like a helicopter that has a thousand
problems with it?”

Beyond the King Stallion’s specific design issues themselves, the Navy has
experienced additional delays in getting redesigned components for additional
testing, according to Bloomberg. Part of this may be due to the fact that the
sole subcontractor responsible for the gearbox casings on the CH-53K filed for
bankruptcy in 2016.

The Pentagon did not name this firm in a September 2018 report to President
Donald Trump discussing risks to the U.S. defense industrial supply chain, which
was the first public acknowledgment of this specific issue. The company was also
the only domestic supplier of gearbox casings for the Boeing AH-64E Apache
gunship helicopter and Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey family. The Navy said would
approach other potential manufacturers to find an alternate source for these
parts to meet its particular requirements by the end of 2018, but it is unclear
if they have found a replacement firm or firms.

Sikorsky remains upbeat that it will be able to resolve the remaining issues
with the CH-53K and deliver sufficient helicopters to meet the Marine Corps’
demands to conduct its first operational missions with the type sometime between
2023 and 2024. Falk, the company’s King Stallion program manager, also said that
engine exhaust ingestion issue should be resolved this year, according to
Vertical.

Its still unclear whether this means that the flight test plan will continue as
planned or might end up getting accelerated, in order to try and have sufficient
helicopters ready by the end of the year so that the Marines can declare initial
operational capability. Testing the helicopter’s propulsion system, flight
controls, and avionics are still on the agenda, Falk told Vertical. The goal is
also to evaluate the CH-53K ability to fly in various environmental conditions
and operating envelopes, as well as its capabilities when operating from Navy
amphibious ships before the end of the year.

The Marines also remain heavily invested in the CH-53K as the need for a
replacement for the aging CH-53Es becomes increasingly urgent. The Corps’ aging
Super Stallions have suffered a number of high-profile crashes in recent years
and the helicopters have only become increasingly hard to maintain as time has
gone on.

Hopefully, the remaining issues with the CH-53K will prove to be relatively easy
to rectify and any additional delays will be minor. After more than a decade of
difficulties already, the Marines can ill afford to wait much longer for the new
helicopters.




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