Air Force Secretary Deborah James on Friday vowed to protect the Combat Rescue Helicopter (CRH) program, even if the service is forced to enact sequestration-related budget cuts.
“Even if we have to live with sequestration, our best advice would be ‘do not touch that program,’” James told House Appropriations defense (HAC-D) subcommittee Ranking Member Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) during testimony to the committee on the Air Force’s fiscal year 2016 budget request.
Photo: Sikorsky
The Air Force in June awarded Sikorsky a $1.3 billion contract for the initial engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of CRH. The contract also includes procurement of the first four of the program’s planned 112 aircraft. If all options are exercised, the total contract amount is valued at $7.9 billion. Sikorsky was the only bidder (Defense Daily, June 26).
The Defense Department requested a base budget of $534 billion for FY ’16, $11 billion more than allowed by sequestration caps. The Air Force, for its part, requested $167 billion, 6.9 percent more than the nearly $153 billion enacted in FY ’15.
The Air Force wants $156 million in FY ’16 for CRH and anticipates requesting $1.4 billion through FY ’20. CRH will replace Sikorsky’s HH-60G, which has a primary mission of conducting day, night and marginal weather combat search and rescue missions in hostile or non-permissive environments. The CRH development effort will procure a total of nine developmental test aircraft and other necessary ground and flight assets, according to the Air Force’s budget justification book.
CRH is in system development and demonstration (SDD) because it has passed Milestone B approval and is conducting EMD tasks at meeting validated requirements before full-rate production (FRP). The Air Force expects this EMD phase to last through June 2020. Other major milestones include an aircraft system requirements review by the end of June, an aircraft preliminary design review (PDR) by the end of June 2016, an aircraft critical design review (CDR) by June 2017 and a possible Milestone C decision by the end of 2019.
Sikorsky is a unit of United Technologies Corp. [UTX]