By Ann Roosevelt
The Boeing [BA] CH-47 Chinook helicopter program would benefit from congressional authority for multiyear procurement authority and D-to F-model conversion recommended in the Conference Report on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008.
“It provides to the government, the Army and the taxpayers a significant benefit in the savings they receive basing procurement on five years worth of Chinooks rather than year-by-year procurement,” Jack Dougherty, director, Boeing H-47 programs, said in an interview with Defense Daily. Additionally, for the company and the supply chain, multiyear procurement offers the stability of knowing what the delivery schedule is going to be in the next five years.
If approved by the House and Senate, two sentences will change Chinook procurement.
In Section 113 of the report, conferees say the Army Secretary may “enter into a multiyear contract, beginning with the fiscal year 2008 program year, for conversion of CH-47D helicopters to the CH-47F configuration.”
The F-model is the most recent CH-47 model, incorporating the Rockwell Collins [COL] Common Avionics Architecture System (CAAS) digital cockpit. The F-model recently began fielding to the Bravo ‘Varsity’ Company, 7th Battalion, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) (Defense Daily, Aug. 17).
The following Section 114 would allow the Army to enter into a multiyear contract beginning with the fiscal year 2008 program year, for procurement of CH-47F helicopters.
Costs will be reduced with multiyear procurement compared to annual procurement and Boeing is preparing for such work, if both houses of Congress pass the bill.
“We’ve submitted a preliminary proposal to the Army so they could understand what they could expect, so they can compare it to the [Program Objective Memorandum] POM,” Dougherty said.
The Army is likely to take two to three months to evaluate the multiyear proposal, he said.
Boeing was cautiously optimistic conference authorizers would approve multiyear efforts after appropriators approved the measure in the Act signed into law last month.
With a multiyear contract in place, Dougherty said, “There are some thing we could do, or more importantly, suppliers could do, in terms of capital improvement, or changes, that frequently have a payoff period longer than a year.”