Lockheed Martin plans to offer what it calls a “turnkey solution” for the US Army’s new rotary-wing training programme, including new aircraft, maintenance support, simulators and instruction services.
However, the defence giant is taking a different approach than other competitors for the Flight School Next contract. Those competitors include Bell, Robinson and Leonardo.
While those rotorcraft manufacturers are crafting bids centred around their respective aircraft, Lockheed plans to submit a “platform agnostic” proposal featuring a third-party aircraft.
The company says this will allow it to craft the best overall solution for the army, both in terms of cost and outcomes for pilot trainees.
“They’re pushing their product, and they think their product is the best solution for that,” Eric Carney, director of strategy and business development for air and commercial solutions at Lockheed, says of the company’s competitors.
Carney spoke to FlightGlobal on 20 February during a tour of Lockheed’s training and logistics solutions centre in Orlando, Florida.
Rather than build a training programme around a specific aircraft, Lockheed plans to work backwards from the US Army’s final requirements to select an aircraft and design a training syllabus to best fit those needs.
Carney describes focusing on a particular aircraft solution too early in the process as a “pitfall”.
“We work with the customer and find the right platform,” Carney notes, “which is different than making a platform and telling you that’s the one you have to have and then try to design training around it.”
While the army has not yet issued a formal request for proposal that will lay out its full requirements for a new rotary-wing training programme, service leaders have offered clear hints as to the direction they are moving.
“We want to go to a simple, single-engine, basic helicopter so that our pilots, when they come out of flight school, they are expert pilots,” said army vice chief of staff General James Mingus at the recent Army Aviation Association of America conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
Mingus and other senior army leaders say the twin-engined Airbus Helicopters UH-72A currently used for training new aviators is overly complex with too many automated features to be effective at training basic pilot skills.
The army has experienced an uptick in serious aviation mishaps in recent years, with multiple high-profile crashes involving Boeing AH-64 and Sikorsky UH-60 helicopters, which are being attributed in part to a general decline in the competency of new pilots.
While Lockheed is not offering any hints as to which rotorcraft it might offer, Carney says the company’s strategy for the aircraft itself will be to reduce costs and increase availability.
“What our customers want is a platform that… [is] reliable and can be sustained with a supply chain that allows them to operate it often,” he notes.
“They want their students fly into the initial phase as much as possible.”
Rival Bell is taking a similar approach, with a full training service and support package that Bell says will lower the aggregate cost for the army. However, that bid is also based around Bell’s 505 light-single as the training aircraft.
Lockheed has seen success with its “turnkey” approach to initial military aviation training, currently running programmes with Singapore, Australia and the UK. Carney notes some of those contracts feature competitor aircraft, including the Textron Beechcraft T-6 and Pilatus PC-21.
“This is not something that’s new for Lockheed Martin,” says Jay Pitman, general manager of the company’s training, logistics and simulation business.
Unlike some prospective customers, the US Army already knows how to train effective military aviators, Pitman says. So Lockheed is pitching lower costs and better outcomes, rather than simply in-house expertise.
“How do we maximise the throughput? How do we maximise the amount of time in the air?” he explains. “At the end of the day, coming up with a more-efficient training system that reduces costs.”
While the strategy of opting for a third-party aircraft may offer some competitive benefits to Lockheed, the company also does not have much of a choice in the matter.
Although Lockheed owns vertical-lift titan Sikorsky, the rotorcraft manufacturer’s civil and military portfolios do not include a product that would seem to align with the US Army’s stated interest in a lightweight, single-engined platform.
However, that reality opens up the possibility that Lockheed could propose a contractor-owned model for the army’s new trainer fleet, as the company is not attempting to sell Sikorsky aircraft as part of the contract.
While the US military has not widely embraced that approach, the army has shown some openness to it in recent years. The service has contractor-owned/contractor-operated (COCO) long-range surveillance jets currently flying in the Indo-Pacific under the Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System programme.
Additional contractor-owned aircraft will soon be coming online under the Army Theater-level High-Altitude Expeditionary Next Airborne-Signals Intelligence effort.
In 2024, the US Navy also launched a trial programme for new rotary-wing trainees, using contractor-owned/contractor-operated aircraft for basic flight instruction at a privately run flight school in Fort Worth, Texas.
“I think what we’re finding is that requirement that you had to own everything is not cost effective for the military,” Carney says, without confirming Lockheed will propose a COCO model for the army.
“Their acquisition dollars are stretched thin, and they have to be focused on their frontline, war-fighting platforms,” he adds.
