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How To Cut The Cost Of The President's New Helicopter.



 
 
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Old March 7th 09, 05:40 AM posted to rec.aviation.rotorcraft
mike
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Posts: 43
Default How To Cut The Cost Of The President's New Helicopter.

How To Cut The Cost Of The President's New Helicopter.
http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1380.shtml

There's a simple way of eliminating all of the recently reported cost
increase in the presidential helicopter replacement program: kill the
more advanced version of the new copter and stick with the initial
design. Doing that would give President Obama a much safer, more
capable helicopter than he has today, while accelerating the rate at
which the whole presidential fleet is converted to modern rotorcraft.
In addition, terminating the high-cost version would reduce the price-
tag for the program back to its originally projected baseline of $6.8
billion.

To understand why this is the only reasonable path open to the
government, you have to understand the drawbacks of the other options
available to the White House. One possibility would be to stick with
the current plan, which envisions taking delivery of five "Increment
One" helicopters and then proceeding to buy an all-new fleet of 23
"Increment Two" helicopters with many additional features. Increment
Two copters would be better than the initial design, but their
performance specifications are so demanding that no helicopter in the
world can currently meet them, so the Increment One airframe would
have to be redesigned. God knows how much that might eventually cost
-- or how much time it would take to integrate and test the final
product.

The other option available to the White House is to simply cancel the
replacement program and stick with the existing fleet. That option
was dangerous even before diagrams of the electronic system for one of
the existing presidential helicopters turned up on an Iranian web-
site. According to a story by Reuters reporter Andrea Shalal-Esa, the
diagrams were accidentally made accessible to outsiders by someone
using file-sharing software. It isn't a big deal -- the information
was unclassified -- but it adds to the litany of reasons for not
sticking with the existing presidential copters.

The current fleet of VH-3D and VH-60N helicopters has been operating
for a long time, with the larger VH-3D that usually carries the
President tracing its origins back to the 1950s. The VH-3Ds in the
White House fleet today have logged 30 years of operations, meaning
they have reached the point in their design life when unexpected
problems begin to occur. But the main impetus for replacing them
quickly came from the 9-11 attacks, because once the possibility of
terrorist attacks became real the deficiencies of the present fleet
were all too obvious. Most of the details are secret, but it appears
the current fleet lacks the range, payload, protections and
communications necessary so the President can survive and carry out
his responsibilities when the government is under attack.

One reason why the cost of the new helicopters got out of control was
that the White House's urgency about fielding a replacement clashed
with the Navy's standards for developing rotorcraft. But the larger
issue was that the Secret Service and other organizations supporting
the President loaded up the final version of the copter with too much
stuff. An exhaustive government study has concluded that the
helicopter chosen for the job is the only one that can carry all the
necessary payload to desired ranges while still landing safely in
confined spaces like the White House lawn. Since the contractor has
already built nine new helicopters (four for testing, five for
presidential use) that are far better than those carrying the
President today, the safest, cheapest thing to do would be to jettison
all the add-ons and just stick with the low-cost version of the new
helicopter for the whole fleet.
 




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