"There are whole new product lines of state-of-the-art rotorcraft from several different companies that provide the Army with exactly what it is looking for" in an LUH or LRH helicopter, Zugschwert said. In fact, helicopter airframe manufacturers have offered virtually their entire fleet of aircraft to the Army.
Nonetheless, clear frontrunners already have emerged. The Bell 210 is an early favorite for the LUH mission while MD Helicopters' MH-6 has the edge in the LRH competition.
Both helicopter types have the advantage of being well-known to the Army. The 210, for instance, is an FAA-certified UH-1H Huey with dynamic components from the Bell 212. The Huey has been in service since the Vietnam War. There are roughly 10,000 UH-1s internationally; more than 400 used by the Army.
Thus, the 210 can be procured now at a cost of less than $3 million and delivered to the Army within eight months after certification, Bell's Fitzgerald said.
The aircraft's O&S costs also are some 10 percent less than the older Huey and half as expensive as the Black Hawk-an estimated $541/hour for the 210 versus $1,312/hour for the Black Hawk, according to Conklin & de Decker, an independent aviation research firm in Arlington, Texas.
The savings could be substantially greater if the dynamic components on the 210 significantly reduce the time between overhaul, the firm added. That is why, according to Bell, the 210 will have O&S some 42 percent less than the older Huey.
Additionally, Bell is offering the Army "performance-based logistics," whereby the company provides all logistics and support services while guaranteeing certain operational readiness rates.
"In terms of cost, the Army couldn't do much better than the Huey," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. "There are so many [of these helicopters] in service, and [LUH] has never been a requirement the Army wanted to spend money on."
The Army's requirement for a light utility helicopter has existed since 1996; however, it has never been funded, Gen. Sinclair said. According to deputy chief of staff for operations, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, that's because the service faced a funding shortfall of some five billion dollars annually for most of the past decade.
This specifically meant shortchanging Army modernization initiatives like the Apache Longbow, aircraft survivability equipment, the Patriot Missile system, Bradley tanks-"all of the big stuff that it takes to run an Army," Cody said. "The Army had to make some tough calls every year," he noted.
This year, by contrast, for the first time in recent memory, Army aviation has not a single un-funded requirement.
If cost is the Army's biggest concern, then the service may opt to procure the PT6-powered Huey, which is even less expensive than the Bell 210. The PT6 Huey is being produced by DynCorps International and Global Helicopter Technology, Inc. The aircraft features the Pratt & Whitney PT6-67D engine and, at roughly one million dollars a copy, is one-third the procurement cost of the Honeywell T-53-17B-powered 210.
However, unlike the 210, the PT6 Huey will be not be remanufactured as a zero-time aircraft with new dynamic components. Yet, with new dynamic components, "in most cases, you double or triple the component times for overhaul," Fitzgerald said.
The PT6 features an improved tailrotor for enhanced directional control. "The standard Huey is known for lack of tailrotor power," said Scott Gardner, Global Helicopter Technology's vice president for operations.
The PT6 Huey also has received FAA certification. "How fast Bell says they can push that through the FAA-all I can is good luck, because we spent three years at it," Gardner said. Global Helicopter Technology did the certification work and produces the aircraft's Tail Rotor Enhancement Kit. Bell officials said they expect that the 210 will be FAA certified no later than the middle of next year.
Bell also is touting its ability to support the Army with "OEM-certified parts." But it is unclear how much this matters to the Army. According to Fitzgerald, only Bell can provide parts warrantees and fixed lifecycle costs with virtually no risk to Uncle Sam. "There's no guesswork here; we know what it costs to maintain a 212 component," he said.
But as Gardner observed, the Army owns a huge inventory of Huey parts. The service, he said, probably doesn't want to spend more money to procure additional spares, when it already has these abundantly available in its own depots.
For that reason, DynCorps and Global dispute the notion that O&S costs for the PT6 Huey are significantly higher. "Yes, it is true that a larger pool of spares is required. But the economics of the existing parts, even with a shorter life is, without doubt, less than the quite expensive 210 components," Gardner said.
Bell officials disagreed, but acknowledged that the PT6 Huey's up-front procurement cost is markedly less than the 210. However, they said the company is offering similarly-priced Huey II upgrade, which is just as good as the PT6 variant.
In any case, a number of commercial utility aircraft other than the Huey also are potential LUH solutions. By Aboulafia's count, these include the MD Explorer, Bell 427, Bell/Agusta Aerospace AB139, AgustaWestland A109, Eurocopter EC135, and Sikorsky S-76.
Equally important to the industry are all of the smaller-scale aircraft improvements, which have long been neglected, but which now are being funded. Aircraft survivability equipment, for instance, is now the "number one priority" of Army aviation. Yet, the service conspicuously failed to appropriate money for ASE in its FY03, 04 and 05 budgets.