Helicopter capability - Defence Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)

MR NICK WHITNEY, MR DAVID PITCHFORTH, MR DEREK SHARPLES AND MR ALEX SHARP

19 MAY 2009

  Q40  Mr Jenkin: We have just heard these Pumas are doing 35,000.

  Mr Whitney: It is only limited to 10,000 by the requirement that was set in the early days. We have actually done studies that are ongoing right now with the Ministry of Defence, and the aircraft is capable of being extended to 15,000 hours.

  Q41  Mr Jenkin: That is still half of 30,000 hours. It does not sound such good value for money?

  Mr Whitney: You are not flying anything like that rate in the military. In a civil environment you are flying much, much more.

  Q42  Robert Key: How do you decide when extending the out-of-service date introduces unacceptable risk? How do you decide in engineering terms, or is it not an engineering decision? It is a statistical decision, or a legal decision. How do you decide?

  Mr Whitney: I do not think that is an industry decision. Industry will have a requirement to upgrade an aircraft and we will upgrade that to within the design specification that is laid upon us. That may or may not prove possible. If you require full crashworthiness on an old aircraft that may not be possible because physically the structure is incapable of being upgraded to that point.

  Q43  Robert Key: Have I got it right, you have said it is not the manufacturer's responsibility to make the judgment about the risk of extending the life of a helicopter?

  Mr Whitney: Clearly there is an absolute judgment to be made, but there is a specification that will be laid upon the manufacturer that we will be complying with.

  Q44  Robert Key: Who makes that specification?

  Mr Sharples In fact it is the responsibility of the design authority for the helicopter. In the case of Eurocopter, we are the design authority for the design of our own helicopters. To answer your question directly: it is the responsibility of our engineering team to make the statistical analysis on failure rate. To give you a number, if I may: the commercial certification requirements oblige the design of passenger-carrying machines—be they helicopters or airplanes—not to fail within 1 x 109 flying hours. There is a statistical obligation on the designers to ensure that aircraft will not fail; and, therefore, the designers build in redundancy either to the airframe or to the systems to ensure that that failure rate in all circumstances be it original design or upgrade is maintained. In our case, for the Puma upgrade our engineering team has calculated, as you would call it, the "consequences" of the upgrade programme. We have worked jointly hand-in-hand with the MoD, and it is a joint decision in this case—it will be a joint decision between industry and the MoD—to upgrade the programme based on upgrade experience that we already have, for example, in the Puma fleet in Portugal, and in the military fleets in the Middle East, which have already been upgraded.

  Q45  Robert Key: The Ministry of Defence is going to spend £235 million, is it, on upgrading the 43 Pumas, when we know that the Puma is not crashworthy and is therefore not fit for purpose. Is that not true?

  Mr Sharples: I would not comment on whether or not—

  Q46  Robert Key: Why will you not comment?

  Mr Sharples: I will comment on the question of the life extension programme, Mr Key. The objective I think of an extension programme is to improve the performance, the availability, the reliability, the easiness of operation of the helicopter and, therefore, the safety of that helicopter as well. The life extension programme of the Puma fleet will see the aircraft re-engined; new avionics systems; new digital autopilot; it will see new engine control systems; new tail rotor blades; a strengthened tail. All of those enhancements will ensure that that helicopter is more reliable, easier to operate and more available for the next 10 years than it has been in the past.

  Q47  Robert Key: None of which has anything to do with its crashworthiness?

  Mr Sharples: I think it does, if I may. I think strengthening the tail; I think providing greater power margin; I think ensuring that engine control is simpler and easier to operate for the pilots; yes, I think that does improve crashworthiness.

  Q48  Chairman: Could you explain that, please? Can you talk us through why engine control improves crashworthiness?

  Mr Sharples: Automatic engine control allows the engines to respond more quickly when power is called for by the pilot. Therefore, in a situation where the pilot may find himself and his crew operating in marginal conditions, for example in hot and high conditions in mountains or in very severe weather conditions, his ability to call and expect to receive additional power at critical moments makes the aircraft a safer, more reliable machine.

  Q49  Robert Key: Will the recent High Court judgment about the Human Rights Act aspect of this make any difference to your decision-making when it comes to the extension of aircraft life, knowing that you are going to be responsible for sending military personnel into theatre in an aircraft that you must know is not crashworthy?

  Mr Sharples: Once again, the Puma is a very crashworthy aircraft and will be more so—

  Q50  Robert Key: I am sorry, did I hear that right: it "is a very crashworthy aircraft"?

  Mr Sharples: I did say that. The Puma is designed according to the design standards required by both the civil aviation authorities and the military aviation authorities.

  Q51  Robert Key: What percentage figure is it in terms of the crashworthiness scale?

  Mr Sharples: I am sorry, I do not have the figure.

  Q52  Robert Key: Someone trotted out some statistics a few minutes ago about, "This helicopter is 50%, that one is 90%". What about the Puma?

  Mr Sharples: Do you mean in terms of its accident rate, for example? Yes, I can give you a statistic on that. Offshore in the civilian world the fatal accident rate of the Super Puma is currently running at less than 0.5 fatal accidents/100,000 flying hours—that is half the average for offshore oil and gas helicopters in general.

  Q53  Chairman: Is that the most dangerous aspect of flying that the Pumas do?

  Mr Sharples: I am not sure I can answer that question, Chairman. You could make a judgment yourself on how dangerous offshore oil and gas operations are. They are certainly very challenging; certainly a very difficult and demanding environment.

  Robert Key: If the Ministry of Defence decided not to spend £235 million upgrading these non-crashworthy aircraft, what would be available instead?

  Chairman: I want to say the witness has said that he considers that the Puma is crashworthy, so I do not want you to ask the question in a way that denies the witness's answer.

  Q54  Robert Key: I have my opinion, Chairman, but of course I accept your advice. What alternative is available to the Ministry of Defence to purchase or to upgrade, if they decided that they were not prepared to take the risk of flying with Puma?

  Mr Sharples: Once again, the risk associated with the upgrade is a shared risk both between industry and the Ministry of Defence. The design authority for the Puma is industry and, therefore, it is our responsibility to ensure the integrity of the design.

  Q55  Robert Key: So this is going to be a question for the Ministry of Defence, for Ministers, I guess, in the end, because they are going to have to make the judgment. Could I just ask about the Sea King Sikorsky, and the fact that here we have a wonderful aircraft, in which we flew quite recently, but it is 40 years old, and there is a proposal to extend the life by a further four years for the Mk7s and another six years for the Mk4s. There were cracks in the mainframe 10 years ago; there are cracks in the mainframe now. How realistic is it to keep this wonderful old antique flying on operational duties? After all, it is now going to go to Afghanistan with Carson blades and that is wonderful but is it worth the risk?

  Mr Sharp: I defer to my colleague from AgustaWestland. From a Sikorsky point of view, clearly we have looked at it in the commercial—our business is both commercial and military. We have moved on in the commercial world and developed the S-92, which we have put out into the fleet—there are over 100 of them out there now; the ones in the North Sea flying at 185-190 hours/ month; there are four of them that are now deployed with your UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency in pretty challenging conditions up on Sumburgh and Stornoway and doing some pretty great things. I cannot comment on whether that upgrade is the right thing or not really. That judgment is going to come through MoD; it is going to come through combatant commanders with the operational requests that are going to go to the requirements officers in Whitehall, and they are going to go and find out what the best piece of kit is that you want to put out on the front line. There are obviously other alternatives in the market today that you could purchase.

  Q56  Chairman: Mr Whitney, do you need to add anything on that?

  Mr Whitney: No, not on Sea King. I think the same arguments apply. It is an old aircraft but you can upgrade it, and it is operating in Afghanistan as we speak. In terms of the direct question about what alternatives—I think the alternatives are in line with the early questioning about reducing the fleet numbers and potentially buying more of what you have got.

  Q57  Mrs Moon: The Royal Aeronautical Society has expressed a concern that the Ministry of Defence's industrial strategy could have an erosion of the UK's rotorcraft defence technological and industrial base. Would you agree with that? Does the strategy provide an adequate basis for your relationship with the MoD?

  Mr Pitchforth: The Defence Industrial Strategy is the reason I am sat here today from Boeing. It requested that Boeing put down more of an in-country presence with engineering capability and what was described as a "footprint", to give the MoD the ability to interact with a company in an easier manner. We are doing that and we embraced the Defence Industrial Strategy as a good thing, which gave clarity to industry; and we have invested because of it and we would actually like to see that strategy reinvigoured and picked up and moved forward again so we can continue to use it as a roadmap to how we should be engaging with the Ministry of Defence.

  Mr Whitney: If I take the AgustaWestland answer, we fully supported the Defence Industrial Strategy; indeed, we signed a strategic partnering arrangement with the Ministry of Defence in June 2006 and have seen real benefit from that in terms of the way in which we work together and plan together; and look to manage some of the problems that there are in terms of managing the helicopter fleet with a small budget, shall we say. I think the more that can be done in terms of partnering and strategic partnering under the guise of the Defence Industrial Strategy the better.

  Mr Sharp: If I could just address that from a Sikorsky point of view. I think less of a focus for us—certainly we are not part of your Defence Industrial Strategy per se—but we certainly from a corporate standpoint, would look at partnering as so important across all of our different military and customer bases. From a military standpoint on the support side, we have partnering agreements in Columbia; we have got manufacturing partnerships in Turkey; we have got manufacturing partnerships in the Czech Republic as well as in Poland. I think partnering is clearly a way forward. We are surely not going to try to bake the birthday cake, put the icing on and deliver candles all from the United States to anywhere; but partnering with somebody in-country to deliver high quality, high dispatch reliability products is clearly the way forward.

  Mrs Moon: Does the Strategy place sufficient emphasis on competition?

  Q58  Chairman: That is the other side of the question.

  Mr Sharples: Eurocopter has taken the decision to invest in the UK to support the current fleet in service, but also to exploit the opportunities that the Defence Industrial Strategy brings for us; but, to do so, competition is absolutely critical. The market must be open to us to allow us to compete against the incumbent manufacturers. By doing so, I genuinely believe that Her Majesty's Government and the Ministry of Defence will obtain the benefits of technology investment, transfer of intellectual property, generation of employment, investment in new skills, overall best value for money. The more that the Defence Industrial Strategy opens the market and concentrates on competition, the better I think it will be for the Ministry of Defence, for the Armed Forces and for the UK taxpayer.

  Q59  Mrs Moon: Does that imply that you do not think it has opened up to competition enough yet?

  Mr Sharples: I think we would be happy to be invited to have every opportunity to bid whenever those opportunities are available.

  Mr Pitchforth: The first version of the Defence Industrial Strategy focussed mainly on maintaining and preserving the skills in-country and/or growing those skills as we have done with Boeing. We have done that with our partners at Vector Aerospace in Fleetland in our depth line, increased the knowledge, capability and skills in-country. I think there is another version of the Strategy which is imminent, I guess, and we would be interested to know what that says about some of these other points that would need addressing.


 
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