Nearly a decade ago, U.S. Air Force officers formulated a list of requirements for a new combat, search and rescue helicopter replacement eventually called CSAR-X. Stung by failures through the end of the last century, CSAR experts knew they needed a smallish medium-lift helicopter that could be deployed quickly and survive some of the worst combat environments.

As U.S. forces continue to find themselves waging irregular warfare or facing nature’s wrath, combatant commanders could be forced to move the CSAR fleet around in a snap for quick deployment. The aircraft needs to be able to take and return fire just to penetrate, survive and return from combat or disaster zones with no clear fronts.

The current CSAR fleet of H-60 variants lacks the inherent capability to do the job, experts say. "We had all of that experience through the ’90s," one of the early requirement writers said. "The key was to get in an aircraft without a large logistics footprint."

Instead, the Air Force picked what many military aviation experts consider to be a heavy-lift helicopter – a Boeing HH-47 Chinook variant that took longest of all the competing platforms to prepare for its mission after being deployed, and which has a questionable survivability record, according to some of the very Air Force CSAR experts who set down those initial requirements.

Bigger not better

Bigger in this case is not better – and that comes straight from the Air Force’s own 2002 Analysis of Alternatives for the CSAR aircraft. CSAR experts say larger helicopters are clumsy, slow and bulky, and present a bigger target.

In its defense, Boeing says it has supplied a combat-proven, medium-lift helicopter that meets CSAR requirements, even though its own literature has listed the Chinook as a heavy-lift model and the 47 is the biggest of the three competing CSAR-X candidates, by a relatively large margin.

"Procuring the HH-47 for the CSAR mission makes as much sense as entering a Winnebago in a NASCAR race," said John Guilmartin, a retired Air Force pilot with two Southeast Asia combat tours flying "Jolly Green" HH-3E and CH-53 rescue helicopters.

Now a history professor at Ohio State University, Guilmartin logged some 130 combat missions over a span of nine years and participated in the Gulf War Air Power Survey, an Air Force-sponsored study of the impact of air power on the first Gulf War. Part of the task force’s charter was to examine CSAR in the conflict.

Boeing disagrees with Guilmartin’s assessment and his ability to make an informed one.

"He’s not a Chinook pilot," said Rick Lemaster, Boeing HH-47 program manager. "If he had flown combat missions in a 47 in the last 10 years, then he might be able to apply his insight in CSAR here."

But Guilmartin stands by his CSAR experience and his belief that the Chinook would be a disaster, a lumbering beast.

How it happened

To find out how this happened with a $15 billion program the Air Force says is one of its top priorities, Aerospace DAILY interviewed scores of experts in and out of the service, many of whom have been involved with the CSAR-X program from its inception, and several who wrote the requirements for the new helicopter fleet. As might be expected, several of the key officials are now working – or have worked – for contractors involved in the fight for the contract, which is now in the midst of its third proposal request review.

The DAILY also obtained and reviewed key acquisition and other program documents, and analyzed government databases and other associated documents. The story that emerges from this study reveals how the acquisition was skewed in favor of certain helicopters from the very beginning by lawmakers and Pentagon officials, regardless of the requirements set forth by the Air Force’s own CSAR experts.

Changing requirements

The review also shows how relatively low-level Air Force officials changed the core of those requirements – the key performance parameters (KPPs) – to try to eliminate or retain their helicopters of choice (Aerospace DAILY, Feb. 23, 2007; Dec. 17, 2007). In the case of the HH-47 Chinook variant, the officers actually changed a KPP to make sure the helicopter could get into the running, then improperly altered official Pentagon records after the fact to make sure the change stuck, according to the interviews and a review of the records. The Air Force brass then went on to give members of Congress contradictory and misleading explanations for the changes, as well as explanations of how and when they occurred.

All of this appears, according to the requirement-makers, to have been done without regard to the mission needs. "That original selection team was led by acquisition [officers] with no insight into the operational mission," said another former Air Force official involved in developing early CSAR requirements.

Now, after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has twice upheld protests by competitors Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky (Aerospace DAILY, Aug. 31, 2007), the CSAR-X replacement is running more than a year behind schedule. But ironically, one of the reasons why the program wound up in such a tangled mess is because some key acquisition decision-makers or shapers wanted certain aircraft because they would be ready sooner.

Officials with the competing companies say the new review is focusing more on operational performance than before, which makes these questions even more pertinent. And the acquisition is now the subject of congressional, Senate and Defense Department Inspector General reviews.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in an exclusive series of articles, based on dozens of interviews, reviews of key documents and analysis of military databases, exploring how the U.S. Air Force came to choose Boeing’s HH-47 for its Combat Search and Rescue helicopter replacement (CSAR-X), and the ramifications of that choice for the service, the industry competitors and the warfighter.