As the Army’s Apache multi-role combat helicopter moves into the next phase, Block III, program officials are considering what’s over the horizon as the program evolves.
“We have been thinking about what’s beyond Block III since we were pushing to get Block III into development,” Col. Shane Openshaw, project manager Apache Helicopters, said at a briefing at the Association of the United States Army annual conference in Washington, Oct. 25. “It’s all about what’s next.”
It’s an evolutionary journey that began when Boeing [BA] began building the first A Model Apaches and they began to be delivered in the mid 1980’s, he said. Oct. 22, the Army awarded a $247 million low-rate initial production contract to Boeing to produce 51 aircraft of a planned 690.
“We have been, and we are, and we will continue to look at the set of capabilities that are required to keep the Apache fleet ready and relevant through its lifecycle,” Openshaw said.
Things will have to be done to the aircraft beyond what’s on the books for the Block III program, he said.
“We tackle obsolescence, we tackle reliability, we tackle [operations and support] O&S cost drivers we tackle maintainability, and look at the things that emerge on the aircraft as it gets older,” Openshaw said. “You try to marry those things up with emerging capabilities, gaps in requirements that our warfighters have, and we prioritize those things incrementally and insert them over time.”
The company and the service are looking at new technology insertions.
“We don’t have a program per se to do a Block IV, but we’ll take a look at technologies as they mature and insert them at opportunities where it makes sense to deal with obsolescence, keep it ready and relevant, reducing O&S costs, and at the same time, use that new technology to provide a new capability that warfighters need,” he said.
Openshaw said there is nothing specific that is coming next for the helicopter. The office is working with the warfighters to prioritize a variety of things to determine how they would be inserted.
While that activity is under way, the Block III Apache test aircraft are expanding the flight envelope in a program that is on schedule and “dead on cost,” he said.
The milestone decision to move forward into low-rate initial production came Sept. 27, and the program is on track to deliver the first Block III aircraft in October 2011.
“The bottom line: we are under way with the Block III program,” Openshaw said. “The program is real; it’s demonstrated in tests, and its coming.”