Originally Posted by dmanton300
In fact all the helicopters ordered were delivered on time (or ahead of time) and on budget.
No, this is not correct.
There were two parts to the original contract - one for several
relatively unmodified AW101s for use by the support staff - these were delivered as you mentioned, and later sold to Canada.
The second part was for highly-modified aircraft - all the specified equipment brought the weight up so far that safe flight required more powerful engines, and from what I have seen, a larger-diameter main rotor and thus a longer tail boom, etc.
Naturally, 100% of this development & re-certification cost was billed to the US.
This was progressing fairly well, but was nowhere near delivery of even the first airframe when it was decided that the project had been infected with "gold-plated bloat", with lots of unnecessary equipment designated as "mandatory', and the decision was made to cancel the lot.