Jane Edwards
Lockheed Martin‘s Sikorsky subsidiary has completed a critical design review for the Combat Rescue Helicopter program that aims to replace the U.S. Air Force‘s HH-60G Pave Hawk aircraft.
The CDR’s conclusion will move the HH-60W helicopter toward the assembly, evaluation and testing phase, Lockheed said Tuesday.
A joint team of experts from Sikorsky and the Air Force’s helicopter program developed and evaluated more than 50,000 software and hardware requirements, produced over 300 technical documents, designed 3,000 new parts and performed CDRs on 15 subsystems in order to prepare for the CDR stage.
“We are excited to enter the build phase as the team has leveraged digital design tools to generate manufacturing efficiencies,†said Jim Andrews, CRH chief engineer at Sikorsky.
“This approach will lead ultimately to the HH-60W becoming the first Black Hawk derivative to have a paperless assembly line.”
HH-60W is a variant of the UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter and is designed to carry out military search-and-rescue and recovery missions.
The new helicopter will run on GE T700-701D engines and will have weapons and a tactical mission kit composed of data links and sensors as well as main rotor blades and machined aerostructures designed to mitigate fatigue and corrosion risks.
USAF and Sikorsky plan to conduct the training systems CDR phase in September.
Sikorsky was awarded a $1.28 billion contract in June 2014 to engineer, manufacture and develop four HH-60W helicopters and provide aircrew and maintenance training platforms to the service branch.
The Lockheed subsidiary also secured a $203 million contract option in January to deliver five additional helicopters to the Air Force whose program of record covers the development of 112 CRH aircraft.
