U.S. Navy CH-53K Program Faces Overruns
By Bettina H. Chavanne
PATUXENT RIVER NAVAL AIR STATION, Md.
The U.S. Navy said May 18 that its new heavy-lift helicopter, the CH-53K, has run into cost and schedule problems.
The service is not providing detailed dates or budget yet. “I’m hesitant to throw numbers out,” program manager Capt. Rick Muldoon told Aerospace DAILY. He sent a Program Deviation Report for the Critical Design Review (CDR) to the Pentagon’s acquisition headquarters in January. But the service is still in the throes of navigating the new budget and is unwilling to provide specific figures.
“The schedule drives the cost,” Muldoon demurred. He qualified the problem as “moderate,” and said he is “not worried about Nunn-McCurdy.”
Lt. Gen. George Trautman, deputy commandant of Marine Corps aviation, said on May 3 that his upcoming May 6 meeting with the CH-53K program office was to “talk through potential perturbations in the program (Aerospace DAILY, May 4).” His concerns seem to have manifested themselves with this latest assessment of potential delays and overruns after the completion of the CDR.
Muldoon attributed the delays to numerous factors, including a five-month-late contract award and Sikorsky’s having taken longer than usual to meet its staffing plan. According to Muldoon, it took the company about nearly three times longer than usual to get its one hundred or so subcontractors on contract. Throw in what Muldoon called “technical challenges” in 2008 and the money the Corps took out of the program for other priorities and the resulting delay seems inevitable.
Despite this new hurdle, Muldoon said the CH-53K is meeting all of its key performance parameters. “We have a great team in place right now,” he added. That team will meet again this week to continue what Muldoon called “internal budget deliberations.”
Image: US Navy
