This year marks the Centennial of Naval Aviation, a yearlong celebration in which the naval aviation community reflects on the past 100 years and its unrelenting commitment to sustaining a Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard that wins wars, protects the homefront and enables peace. During this time of reflection on how the Navy's flight program has grown to become a guardian of freedom for America and its allies, it is also a time to look ahead to the next generation of aircraft in development.
Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), whose priorities include delivering new aircraft, weapons and systems that provide a technological edge over adversaries, presented some of its latest developments at the Sea Air Space 2011 Exposition in April. The featured aircraft —the CH-53K Heavy Lift Helicopter, P-8A Poseidon and MQ-4C BAMS UAS — are all in the development phase with the initial operational capability (IOC) planned between 2013 and 2018. At the Service Chiefs Panel, Vice Adm. David Architzel, NAVAIR Commander, explained, "Over the past year, development of air assets has continued at a pace never seen before."
CH-53K Heavy Lift Helicopter
The program office for H-53 Helos (PMA-261) manages the cradle to grave procurement, development, support, fielding and disposal of the entire family of H-53 helicopters. This includes the CH-53D Sea Stallion, CH-53E Super Stallion, MH-53E Sea Dragon, and the newest development, the CH-53K Heavy Lift Helicopter.
As the U.S. Marine Corps mission changes, so does its aircraft — evidenced by the development of the cargo helicopter CH-53K, the future of heavy lift rotorcraft. CH-53K will provide the assault support function in expeditionary maneuver warfare, significantly improve operational capabilities, and reduce life-cycle costs.
The next generation heavy lift aircraft will offer improved performance in support of future warfighting concepts and the Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025.
CH-53K, the follow-on to CH-53E, will maintain virtually the same footprint, but will carry out an unrefueled mission of 110 nautical miles (nm) with a 27,000- pound external payload, nearly doubling the existing payload.
CH-53K will increase the maximum gross weight from 73,000 pounds to 84,700 pounds and will be able to perform in mountainous areas and extremely hot conditions.
Additionally, CH-53K will provide the following increases in performance and capability:
• Four times the lift under hot conditions at 110 nm compared with current heavy lift aircraft;
• Reduction in material maintenance cost;
• Increased survivability; and
• Twenty-three percent reduction in fuel consumption.
CH-53K will provide the Department of Defense with the best high-altitude capability which is critical to operations in austere high-altitude conditions.
Other features of the CH-53K include: General Electric (GE)-381B engines; advanced drive train; fourth-generation composite rotor blades; fly-by-wire flight controls; Rockwell Collins glass cockpit; improved external and internal cargo handling systems; and survivability and force protection improvements, allowing it to range the entire battlefield while protecting the crew and occupants from advanced threats.
The CH-53K program passed Milestone B in December 2005, and a contract was awarded in April 2006. To pass Milestone B, the milestone decision authority must, among other things, approve the acquisition strategy, the acquisition strategy program baseline, and the type of contract that will be used to acquire the system.
The program conducted its preliminary design review in September 2008 in which it completed a critical design review for 30 of 70 subsystems, and successfully conducted a full system CDR in July 2010.
Major components to aid in airframe test article assembly are being produced. Initial operational capability is planned for 2018. IOC is the phase in the acquisition cycle when a capability is available in its minimum usefully deploy-able form.
P-8A Poseidon
The Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft Program Office (PMA-290) manages the acquisition, development, support and delivery of the Navy’s mari-time patrol and reconnaissance aircraft. Its newest development in multimission maritime aircraft, P-8A Poseidon, will replace the P-3C Orion as a long-range anti-submarine warfare (ASW), anti-surface warfare (ASuW), intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft capable of broad area, maritime and littoral operations.
P-8A Poseidon is the U.S. Navy’s persistent, maritime patrol aircraft that will provide superiority in both the open ocean and littoral environments. It will leverage the experience and technology of the P-3C’s capabilities and assets to meet the Navy’s need for developing and fielding a maritime aircraft equipped with significant growth potential, including an extended global reach, greater payload capacity, higher operating altitude, and open systems architecture.
P-8A Poseidon will provide more combat capability from a smaller force and less infrastructure while focusing on worldwide responsiveness and interoperability with traditional manned forces and evolving unmanned sensors.
P-8A Poseidon will provide the follow-ing capabilities:
• Next generation ASW to counter sub-surface threats;
• Detect, locate, identify and track targets in the surface, subsurface and littoral battlespace, and if required, deny, disrupt or destroy;
• Conduct armed ISR in maritime and littoral areas of operation;
• Provide command, control and communications and serve as an interoperable C3 node; and
• Provide accurate stand-off targeting and strike support for naval, joint and multinational operations.
Other state-of-the-art features of the P-8A Poseidon include: International Maritime Satellite communications, sonobuoy launchers, tactical workstations, air refuel receptacles, multimode radar, bomb bay, wing stores, CFM56-7B turbofan engines with 180-kVA integrated drive generators, and an
electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) turret that provides an ever-growing array of co-boresighted video-rate sensors that cover a wide variety of wavebands and fields of view.
In August 2010, the P-8A Poseidon program reached Milestone C and received approval for low-rate initial production. Achieving Milestone C means the program is ready to manufacture production aircraft and begin the process of maturing manufacturing processes and capabilities to support future full-rate production. The Navy plans to purchase 117 production grade P-8A Poseidons, an IOC is planned for 2013.
MQ-4C BAMS UAS
The Persistent Maritime Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office (PMA-262) manages the development, production, fielding and sustainment of all persistent maritime unmanned aircraft
systems including the MQ-4C Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) P-8A Poseidon Unmanned Aircraft System.
The MQ-4C BAMS UAS will be a forward deployed, land-based, autonomously operated system that provides a persistent maritime ISR capability using a multi-sensor mission payload, including: maritime radar; EO/IR; electronic support measures; Automatic Identification System; and basic communications relay.
EO/IR sensors classify, identify and geolocate air, sea-surface and ground targets with signal and image processing techniques that operate from the visible through long wave infrared bands. The MQ-4C air vehicle is based upon the U.S. Air Force RQ-4B Global Hawk, while its sensors are based upon components of (or entire systems) already fielded in the DoD inventory.
As an adjunct to the P-8A, the MQ-4C BAMS UAS will provide combat information to operational and tactical users, such as the expeditionary strike group, carrier strike group and the joint forces maritime component commander. The MQ-4C will provide intelligence preparation of the environment by providing a more continuous source of information to maintain the common operational and tactical picture of the maritime battlespace.
Additionally, MQ-4C-collected data posted to the Global Information Grid (GIG) will support a variety of intelligence activities and nodes. In a secondary role, the MQ-4C will be used alone or in conjunction with other assets to respond to theater-level operational or national strategic tasking.
The Navy acquired two Global Hawk Maritime Demonstration (GHMD) unmanned aircraft in 2006 to be utilized for the development of Navy doctrine and concepts of operations for large persistent unmanned air vehicles. The system has been renamed the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator (BAMS-D).
The BAMS-D team utilizes the RQ-4A long endurance air vehicle to refine tactics, techniques and procedures for use by persistent UASs in a maritime environment.
When fielded, the MQ-4C BAMS UAS will offer a much larger sensor radius than BAMS-D.
While BAMS-D offers a 45-degree field of view for Synthetic Aperture Radar, Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar and maritime surveillance, the MQ-4C radar will provide a 360-degree field of view.
Other improvements will be made to subsystems, engine efficiency and safety.
Subsystems improvements include:
• Improved environmental cooling system and liquid cooling system.
• Upgrade to a 30 kilovolt amps (kVA) generator.
• Wing and V-Tail deicing.
• AN/ZPY-3 Multi-Function Active Sensor – a 360-degree Active Electronically Scanned Array radar.
• AN/DAS-3 EO/IR – 360-degree full motion video capable.
• AN/ZLQ-1 Electronic Support Measures – all digital, 360-degree Specific Emitter Identification capable.
Engine Improvements:
• Bleed air engine inlet anti-icing. Bleed air is compressed air taken from within the engine that can be used in different ways, including deicing.
• Full Authority Digital Engine Control software changes. FADEC is a system consisting of a digital computer, called an Electronic Engine Controller, and its related accessories that control all aspects of aircraft engine performance.
• Additional Built in Test functionality.
• Accessory gear box improvements.
Safety Improvements:
• Fire sensing.
• Fire containment: resistive materials and fire suppression bottle.
• Lightning protection.
• Crash recorder.
The MQ-4C BAMS UAS is a DoD acquisition category (ACAT) 1D program that received approval from the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (USD AT&L) to enter the system development and demonstration phase of development April 18, 2008.
The MQ-4C BAMS UAS program successfully conducted system functional review in June 2009 and is progressing toward future program milestones utilizing the systems engineering technical review process. SDD delivery is anticipated in 2012 with IOC planned for 2015.
Go to www.navair.navy.mil for information about NAVAIR and its many products.
Holly Quick is a contributor to CHIPS and supports the public affairs office of SPAWARSYSCEN Atlantic.