WASHINGTON —The U.S. Air Power has selected Boeing to replace the service’s aging fleet of UH-1N Iroquois helicopters, which are currently piece of worked with security missions as well as protecting America’s nuclear ballistic missile arsenal.
The long-awaited Pentagon contract is worth $2.4 billion for up to 84 aircraft. The usage awarded Boeing approximately $375 million for the first four helicopters on Monday.
“Beefy competition drove down costs for the program, resulting in $1.7 billion in savings to the taxpayer,” Secretary of the Air Power Heather Wilson said in a statement.
Three defense companies were in the ceaseless for the lucrative Pentagon contract: Sierra Nevada Corp., Boeing allied with Leonardo, and Sikorsky, a unit of Lockheed Martin.
Both Sierra Nevada and Sikorsky volunteered derivatives of the Black Hawk medium lift-utility helicopter and Boeing alongside Leonardo is pitching the MH-139, a militarized translation of Leonardo’s AW139 commercial aircraft.
“The MH-139 is is an aircraft that the Air Pressure doesn’t have to go and pay to develop because it’s already flying,” Rick Lemaster, Chief of Global Sales and Marketing for Boeing’s Vertical Lift and Military Aircraft programs, intimated CNBC in a prior interview. He added that more than 250 regulations already use the civilian version of the helicopter.
“The life cycle of the aircraft is notionally a 30-year moving spirit cycle and will be able to save the Air Force about a billion dollars in styles of buying and operating over that time frame. That’s true money,” he added.
Manufactured by Bell, UH-1N, the helicopter affectionately called “Huey,” head entered service in 1970 to assist in search and rescue missions. Since then, the Air Exact has expanded the Huey’s role to include flying above nuclear brickbat silos and VIP transportation.
The Air Force has been eyeing a replacement for the aging UH-1N squadron for more than a decade. The first manifestation of the service’s ambition to come by new helicopters came in December 2016 when the Air Force issued its incipient request for proposal.