Here it is:
AgustaWestland is in talks with the Department of Business for financial support that would see the British defence division of the Anglo-Italian aerospace group transformed into one of the world’s foremost civil helicopter design and manufacturing centres.
It is understood that the Yeovil-based contractor is close to a deal worth tens of millions of pounds from the Regional Growth Fund.
That money would help to set up a production line for the AW189, which AgustaWestland hopes will be chosen by the Department for Transport for Britain’s search and rescue fleet to replace the Sea King — and then become a significant export product to the global oil and gas industry.
The funding will also help Yeovil to become a centre for state-of-the-art fly-by-wire helicopter avionics and for the sprawling south Somerset facility to become the global centre for the development of its AW609 “tilt-rotor” aircraft, which can take off and land like a helicopter but fly faster and further as a fixed-wing aeroplane.
Such technologies in time would be likely to make Yeovil a centre for the future development of helicopter drones, unmanned air vehicles that the Ministry of Defence will be ordering in the next decade.
Such developments would not only sustain 3,500 jobs at Yeovil but also potentially create a further 1,500 directly employed or in the supply chain, including at AgustaWestland’s new hub in Newquay.
“The next six months could change things dramatically for us,” Graham Cole, AgustaWestland’s UK chairman, said. “They are absolutely critical.”
AgustaWestland in the UK is having to migrate its traditional defence business — Merlin, Sea King, Apache and Lynx helicopters — because it has been told by the MoD that it will not be ordering any helicopters for the next ten years. AgustaWestland will have delivered its final order for 62 Wildcats to the UK Armed Forces by 2016.
The mountain and sea search and rescue order for up to 24 helicopters — the Department for Transport’s decision is expected in the next six months — will pitch the AW189 against America’s Sikorsky. For AgustaWestland, however, the contract is seen as a springboard for a potentially huge export market.
The separate decision on financial support from the Regional Growth Fund is expected by the end of this month. Support from the fund would offer some historical irony. The chairman of the body overseeing the regional growth initiative is Lord Heseltine, who caused a schism in the Conservative Party over the future of Westland in the Eighties.
The developments at AgustaWestland, which is owned by Finmeccanica, of Italy, are being watched amid the biggest shake-up of the British defence and aerospace industry in years — BAE Systems is attempting to merge with EADS, the owner of Eurocopter, a competitor to AgustaWestland.
Publicly, AgustaWestland is declining to comment on the merger. Privately, it was irked by comments made by Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, who asserted last week that AgustaWestland “has always been at the margins for Finmeccanica” and that it should consider whether it, too, joins a merged EADS-BAE. A company spokesman said: “AgustaWestland is the jewel in the crown of Finmeccanica. It is absolutely not at the margins.”
Joe Conway, trade union convenor for Unite at AgustaWestland, told The Times that new orders and funding would be “make or break” for Yeovil. “It will be the difference between this place being a global centre in helicopters or becoming just an overhaul and repair business,” he said.