A key differential between the potential bidders is the military experience each have with the platform they are bidding with.
- Airbus - have delivered 52 H175s total - all in the civil market, and converted a civil demonstrator H175 to a mostly-military spec and painted "H175M" on the outside. The nearest they have to "military" are the 7 SAR examples in Hong Kong and a handful of VVIP role aircraft (which is not an NMH requirement)
- Leonardo - have delivered 120 AW149/AW189s, of which 31 are the military AW149
- Sikorsky - have delivered 5000+ UH-60s of many different variants. Practically every single one was delivered for military use (a few in recent years were produced solely for firefighting under the "FireHawk" nomenclature)
The NMH program for 44 helicopters replace Bell 212, Bell 412 Griffin, AS365N3 Dauphin and the venerable Puma - and these four types covered a wide range of roles, including troop transport, SAR, jungle ops, Special Forces Ops and many more no doubt. Given the experience built up by the Black Hawk, that means that Sikorsky effectively have off-the-shelf tried-and-tested variants of their platform ready to go. Airbus and Leonardo are thus a distance behind and most of the required roles will need design and testing time - I suspect some of the design work is being done now while we all wait for MoD to decide if/when they are going to issue the paperwork.
Interesting side note - the Airbus "H175M NMH demonstrator" is currently on a ferry flight back to Marignane after spending 10 days in
Saudi Arabia
[Numbers from Parapex Media]