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Showing posts with label Air rescue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Air rescue. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Update on rescue helicopter
From the AFA on-line magazine: The Air Force has started the search for a platform to replace its HH-60G rescue helicopters by issuing a notice seeking industry input on suitable platforms. Gone is the name CSAR-X for this notional successor platform; the new name is "personnel recovery recapitalization" aircraft. The service would like to issue the first production contract in Fiscal 2012, enabling it to have four trainer assets and four combat-ready aircraft in the fleet no later than Sept. 30, 2015, according to the March 23 notice. Meeting that fielding date "at an affordable cost is critical," states the document. Among the attributes, this platform must be capable of sustaining 130 knots true air speed and have an unrefueled combat mission radius of 220 nautical miles. Earlier this month, the Air Force leadership told Congress that the new platform would likely be based on a mature off-the-shelf design.
Monday, February 8, 2010
More stupidity
I was assigned to a USAF Special Operations unit. Special Ops in the Air Force have two mission; one of course is special operations but the other mission is air rescue. Rescue pilots in the USAF wear a pair of green feet on their name tags to signify the "Jolly Green Giant", the nickname of the first major rescue helicopter. There was a time that no rescue pilot upon entering the officer's club ever had to buy a drink. We have fallen very far from that nobler time...
From the Air Force Association magazine: R.I.P. CSAR-X: The Air Force on Tuesday pounded another nail in the coffin of its now-cancelled CSAR-X program, by “terminating for convenience” its $712 million contract with Boeing from 2006 for the system development and demonstration phase of the HH-47 rescue helicopter. “This contract termination is a result of the CSAR-X program cancellation directed by the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics,” the Air Force wrote in its brief statement, which appeared in the June 2 list of new Pentagon contracts. Why the need for this step, if the CSAR-X program is already history? Well, Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Karen Platt told the Daily Report yesterday that, technically speaking, the stop-work order from Nov. 22, 2006, had still been in effect for the contract that Boeing received from the Air Force for HH-47 work on Nov. 9, 2006, when it won the original CSAR-X competition over Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky. That stop-work order was never lifted as the CSAR-X program remained bogged down in legal protests and the Air Force’s efforts to resolve them up until Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ April 6 announcement that he was killing the program. But just because the original CSAR-X contract is now officially toast doesn’t mean that the need for a new rescue platform has gone away, and the Air Force leadership is working to convince Defense Secretary Robert Gates that a new USAF rescue bird would not be a single-service platform for an inherently joint mission, as Gates maintains.
From the Air Force Association magazine: R.I.P. CSAR-X: The Air Force on Tuesday pounded another nail in the coffin of its now-cancelled CSAR-X program, by “terminating for convenience” its $712 million contract with Boeing from 2006 for the system development and demonstration phase of the HH-47 rescue helicopter. “This contract termination is a result of the CSAR-X program cancellation directed by the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics,” the Air Force wrote in its brief statement, which appeared in the June 2 list of new Pentagon contracts. Why the need for this step, if the CSAR-X program is already history? Well, Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Karen Platt told the Daily Report yesterday that, technically speaking, the stop-work order from Nov. 22, 2006, had still been in effect for the contract that Boeing received from the Air Force for HH-47 work on Nov. 9, 2006, when it won the original CSAR-X competition over Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky. That stop-work order was never lifted as the CSAR-X program remained bogged down in legal protests and the Air Force’s efforts to resolve them up until Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ April 6 announcement that he was killing the program. But just because the original CSAR-X contract is now officially toast doesn’t mean that the need for a new rescue platform has gone away, and the Air Force leadership is working to convince Defense Secretary Robert Gates that a new USAF rescue bird would not be a single-service platform for an inherently joint mission, as Gates maintains.
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