It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better yet to learn from other people’s. On Friday, I watched three battle-scarred acquisition experts — including the admiral who turned the F-35 around — advise a young officer from the Future Vertical Lift initiative, who was furiously taking notes. The panel’s theme: how FVL, which plans to replace a host of current helicopters, can avoid the errors of past programs like the F-35. The good news is the single most important lesson-learned is one FVL is already acting on. The bad news is that FVL’s approach, at least by one assessment, still raises half a dozen “red flags.”
The panel’s top three pointers: split the program into manageable pieces, take advantage of commercial helicopter expertise worldwide, and get Congress on board from the beginning.
The Pentagon must split FVL into multiple programs, developing a different aircraft for each set of mission requirement. That’s the opposite of a single mega-program trying to meet everyone’s needs with variants of one design, the approach behind the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
“Start separate programs when the money is ready,” advised retired Vice Adm. David Venlet, who knows the mistakes made by the F-35 program, since he took it over at its lowest point. “Those separate lines will be easier to defend and manage and, I think, have a better chance of success.”
FVL is already on that path, said Lt. Col. Alison Thompson, special assistant for rotorcraft to Pentagon procurement chief Frank Kendall. The sheer diversity of requirements for future rotorcraft demands a split approach. FVL is looking at four classes of rotorcraft — light, medium, heavy, and ultra-heavy — which will probably end up as four separate programs.
In fact, Thompson told me and another reporter, there may well be five programs. The medium FVL is set to enter service first, sometime in the early 2030s, but “if you look at the medium class” — comparable to the current H-60 Black Hawk/Sea Hawk series and Marine H-1s — “it is very broad, and we already know there’s not one platform can cover that spectrum of requirements,” she told us. That means “medium” may need to be split in two.
Even within a given weight class, there’s the question whether a single program can successfully produce both utility and attack versions of a given design. “It would be very desirable,” Thompson told us, and the Marines manage it in the medium category with their UH-1Y Huey transport and AH-1W Super Cobra gunship, which have about 85 percent of their parts in common. By contrast, the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk and its AH-64 Apache are entirely different designs, but, said Patterson,” if you look at the things any helicopter needs to fly — drive train, engine, communications — “there are lot of things you can have in common.”
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