Editorial

RN Helicopter Plans Hit Rough Air
11 July 2004

Since 1979 the Royal Navy (RN) has operated a force of currently about 29 Westland Sea King HC.4 helicopters (nicknamed the ‘Jungly’) in order to transport and support Royal Marine Commando troops in a primarily amphibious environment.  

After a long and active career, the RN’s Sea King HC.4 force is now badly in need of augmentation and replacement.  But replacing the Jungly’s is not proving to be a simple or quick task.  For example, on 7 April 2004 the United Kingdom's  National Audit Office (NAO) published a report entitled “Ministry of Defence: Battlefield Helicopter”  which investigated the way in which the UK's armed forces operate helicopters in support of land, amphibious, and Special Forces' operations.  It noted:

“A recent [Ministry of Defence] Departmental study concluded that there is currently  … an 87 per cent shortfall in ship-optimised support helicopter lift. Primarily, the latter deficit is a manifestation of a changed strategic environment over the past decade, which has generated a greater requirement to undertake littoral operations. According to the Department, the shortfall in ship-optimised lift will remain until 2018.”

Studies in to what was then termed the Future Amphibious Support Helicopter (FASH) began in the mid-1990’s, with a formal staff requirement expected to be approved in late 1999 for an entry in to service by 2006.  Although the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines cast some envious glances at the Boeing-Bell MV-22 Osprey being developed for the US Marine Corps, but it was generally expected that the requirement would be met by an austere transport variant of the new AugustaWestland EH101 Merlin helicopter, which in its ASW optimized HM.1 form was already order for the Royal Navy.  However in 1998 the British governments ‘Strategic Defence Review’ announced that the transport and battlefield helicopters of the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and British Army would be combined in to one tri-service formation - the Joint Helicopter Command.  Similarly, the RN’s FASH program was merged in to a new joint service Support Amphibious and Battlefield Rotorcraft (SABR) program, the RN thus losing some of the top-level, executive decision making ability in relation to navalised support helicopters.

SABR is a key element of the Ministry of Defence’s plan to resolve the shortfalls revealed by the NAO report.  According to the MOD’s Defence Procurement Agency (DPA), up to 70 SABR airframes will provide the UK’s future medium/heavy amphibious and battlefield helicopter lift capability, along with the existing Boeing Chinook HC.2 and HC.2a, and AugustaWestland Merlin HC.3 helicopters.  It will replace and enhance the capability currently provided by RAF Puma HC.1 and Sea King HC.4 helicopters. SABR will be required to deploy 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marine forces in support of littoral maneuver operations, and be optimized for sustained operations at sea.  It will also contribute to 16 Air Assault Brigade’s air maneuver capability.

RN is concerned that SABR is no longer a simple and cheap Jungly replacement, but rather it has become a sophisticated and expensive “capability provision for Air and Littoral Man oeuvre”, with many diverse user and system requirements that vastly exceed the RN’s fundamental need of being able to quickly move relatively small numbers of Royal Marines with light weight equipment into a beachhead zone from ships positioned not very far off the coast – a task that the Sea King HC.4 excelled at when it was first introduced.

 This concern is closely linked to the huge cost now associated with the SABR program, the latest estimate for the Development & Manufacture phase is £6.5 billion.  The MOD’s Directorate of Equipment Plan has simply not been able to fit this expenditure in to the over-stretched UK Defence Budget in the near term, resulting in decision deferrals and program delays (e.g. the SABR Initial Gate milestone and entry in to the Assessment Phase has just been delayed from Spring 2004 to Autumn 2004).  There is now a high probability that some or all of the existing Puma HC.1’s and Sea King HC.4’s will leave service long before the first SABR helicopters arrive, officially “early next decade”.

Also, it has had to be recognized that selecting only one single helicopter type for SABR will not met all key user requirements.  The main helicopter support requirement (there is a separate Search and Rescue, SAR element) has been spit in to two aircraft procurements: "SABR-heavy" and "SABR-light" invalidating some of the hoped for economies of scale achievable from standardization and negotiating a single large buy.  And “SABR-SAR” may yet require a third type.

For SABR heavy the de facto solution appears to be the Boeing Chinook CH-47, which is much liked by the RAF because of its considerable lifting capacity.  It had been expected that any new Chinook's purchased for SABR would be "marinised" with features such as a folding rotor system, however this may now be dropped on cost grounds, the argument being that if the RN and RAF can manage to successfully operate standard Chinook’s at sea for over ten years, then the requirement can not be that essential.  The only alternative to the Chinook under any consideration seems to be the Sikorsky CH-53 Super Stallion, probably in the form of the new ‘X’ version - the UK co-operating with the US Marine Corps and building upon a close relationship developed in connection with the STOVL variant of the Joint Strike Fighter.  Adopting the CH-53X would require modifications to the LPH HMS Ocean and perhaps one of the small Invincible class aircraft carriers, but studies show that this would be cheaper than introducing bespoke folding mechanisms in to the Super Stallion airframe in order to meet RN lift size restrictions.

For SABR-light the preferred solution has long been the AugustaWestland Merlin HM.3+, however this is no longer a lock due to some interesting developments.  The MOD is using workstrands to try to find better and cheaper ways of "doing defense" and Workstrand 13 was recently tasked with looking at the RN’s helicopter problem, it has apparently come up with some radical suggestions.  The question has now emerged whether a direct replacement is really required for the existing Royal Navy and British Army Lynx light helicopters (under SCMR and BLUH respectively), or whether the capabilities that they provide can be met by a lower cost combination of other systems: - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s); upgraded RN Merlin HM.1's, RAF Merlin HM.3's, Army WAH-64 Apache's, leased civilian standard helicopters, etc.  In particular, it is has been suggested that for the transport and utility role, SCMR and BLUH might be partially merged with the SABR-light requirement and a common medium size transport and utility helicopter selected. 

The AugustaWestland Merlin HM.3+ is seen as being larger and more costly than ideal for a combined SCMR/BLUH/SABR-light requirement, while the Future Lynx is too smal.  The NHIndustries NH90 or perhaps even the Sikorsky MH-60S/R may represent a better choice from the military point of view, the NH90 probably having the edge with the British Army and Royal Marines due to it being fitted with a rear ramp.  EADS (effectively the majority shareholder in NHIndustries via its Eurocopter subsidiary) is believed to be strongly urging the MOD to seriously consider the NH90 for its new helicopter needs

In another twist, the industrial requirement that SCMR and SABR aircraft must be manufactured in the UK took an interesting turn in May 2004 when GKN sold its stake in AugustaWestland to Finmeccanica, making the company entirely Italian owned.  Cautiously, Finmeccanica has negotiated a £35 million reduction in the price if the Westland Yeovil plant doesn't win a substantial amount of SCMR/BLUH work.  Any bid from EADS based upon the NH90 might well involve the Westland Yeovil plant building the helicopters in order to make the offer more politically palatable, but EADS is far from keen about this approach because there are already three NH90 assembly lines in Europe, with plenty of spare capacity for any UK order.  Historically Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation has had very close links with Westland, but whether a UK MH-60 assembly line makes financial rather than political sense in this instance would depend upon the size of the order. 

It seems unlikely that the MOD will be able to start making SABR procurement decisions as rapidly as the UK armed forces want and need, but EADS at least is starting to believe that there might yet be an opportunity for their helicopter product where it did not seem to exist a year ago.

Back to top