The U.S Army had high hopes and hard-charging goals for the next-generation helicopter engine it was working on the Improved Turbine Engine Program in 2019. Then COVID hit and showed that even military programs can get debilitated by virus dynamics.
The Army’s R&D people were hoping to have the new engine type operational enough to be competitive with integrate with new prototype and attack aircraft that are also in the works and scheduled for their first flights.
These together would have advanced the government’s Improved Turbine Engine Program, or ITEP a year ahead of schedule.
As Brigadier General Robert Barrie, the Army’s aviation program executive officer explained recently in deeper detail,
“There was a baseline ITEP schedule, and it required integration on [the AH-64] Apache and [UH-60] Black Hawk [helicopters], and at the time we believed executable was: ‘Hey, there is an opportunity to accelerate that capability of an initial engine that we could fly on the FARA competitive prototypes,’ “
He goes on to note that, You could really take every milestone in a contract schedule and move it ahead a year that you would have leading up to an engine delivery and preliminary flight rating, and that was done with eyes wide open and it was achievable, and no one anticipated a pandemic that was going to affect all of us the way it has, and then specifically development of a lot of that very novel and innovative hardware that goes into the build of an engine as unique as ITEP.”
Barrie does however acknowledge that the ITEP was a program being built on top of another program that itself hinges on the successful scheduling of yet other budget considerations. In other words, Defense Department program politics might have slowed the development of the engine either way.
Overall, despite the Army’s request to the ITEP team to move turnaround time forward as quickly as possible for FARA’s “very aggressive objective”, Barrie notes that they haven’t delivered on previous expectations.
The design for the ITEP was validated by the Army quickly enough that the first tests for the innovative engine were supposed to begin in the first quarter of 2021. COVID was already causing anxieties about the project even then but hadn’t yet affected anything and a fully virtual design review was even pushed through in partnership with General Electric, the ITEP’s developer.
Now, however, after over a year of fully raging COVID restrictions at all levels of global society, the first actual tests of the ITEP engine have been pushed back consistently. They aren’t expected to take place until January of 2022 according to projections from the Army’s Program Executive Office of Aviation.
Based on this delayed milestone, engine qualification procedures such as starting the engine for the first time, full ground testing, and endurance testing will all proceed as of January.
Following the above tests, each FARA competitor will get their test engines for ground and flight tests as of August 2022. These tests will then start as of late 2023, according to a statement from the Program Executive Office.
ITEP is expected to replace many of the existing engines now found in the military’s UH-60 and AH-64 helicopters. It will then finally be integrated with FARA aircraft when they go live.
The Army’s competitive prototyping for these programs has been pitting two major helicopter-makers against each other. Bell and Sikorsky (owned by Lockheed Martin) have both been racing -by Defense Department contract standards of speed- to design, build and have their respective aircraft flying by early 2023 despite the goal having slipped further ahead due to COVID.
According to Barrie, both companies are at 60% of their development targets.
Challenges have been even more significant for second and third-tier suppliers than they have been for the army itself, according to Major General Wally Rugen, who runs the Army’s future vertical lift modernization efforts.
He adds that the “ITEP is a truly transformational capability. This is something we’ve been working on for well over 15 years because it’s hard, and so [being] a bit tardy on a 12-month acceleration that we moved out on in 2019, with COVID, I think, again, this is a strategic win.”
Fortunately, for the many types of helicopters that aren’t in DoD development hell, private charter flight services such as Fair Lifts Aviation are available for all kinds of civilian and government contracts. With Fair Lifts, specialized choppers for transport and environmental helicopter services are on-call all year long.
Photo Credit: Sikorsky