UK reducing New Medium Helicopter buy to 25-35 aircraft: Airbus exec
The Airbus H175M helicopter on display at the Royal International Air Tattoo, RAF Fairford (Breaking Defense)
Updated at 7/17/23 at 2:45pm ET to include a statement from the British Ministry of Defense saying no NMH “advertised requirement” has changed.
RIAT 2023 — The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has decided to slash the number of aircraft set to be acquired under the £1 billion ($1.3 billion) New Medium Helicopter (NMH) program to a maximum of 35 units, an industry official told Breaking Defense today.
An upper limit of 44 aircraft had originally been set in November 2021, but funding issues have led to a much lower target.
“They’ve [MoD] said between 25 to 35 [aircraft], see what you can do in industry,” Lenny Brown, managing director of Airbus Helicopters UK, said in an interview at the Royal International Air Tattoo. “It’s a kind of best effort with the funding available.”
On July 17, two days after the original publication of this report, the MoD provided a statement to Breaking Defense indicating 44 helicopters is officially still part of an “advertised requirement,” as per a 18 May 2022 contract notice.
The acquisition calls for the replacement of Puma helicopters and a number of smaller rotary fleets, including Bell 212, Bell 412 and AS365 Dauphins, but delays have led to an Invitation to Negotiate (ITN) phase, initially scheduled for Q1 2023, being pushed to later this year. The new phase, which will define full requirements and costs, will only happen “at the earliest” in September this year, added Brown.
The UK has also still to confirm when a production contract award will happen or an NMH entry to service date.
Brown explained a number of initial requirements based around “capability, performance and engineering support” have, however, been outlined to industry by the MoD.
“We haven’t seen training requirements and there’s a whole plethora of different chapters that are yet to come, but the MoD has been as good as they can be in drip feeding us information,” he added.
Competitors have also been “directed” by the MoD to use a number of defensive aid kits to prepare for any testing and compliance that would be required once an aircraft production selection has been made, he said. The UK MoD did not immediately respond to an off-hours request for comment on its New Medium Helicopter plans.
If selected, Airbus plans on standing up a H175M helicopter production line in Broughton, Wales, where it currently manufacturers A380 commercial airliner wings, but faces competition from Leonardo UK, offering AW149 helicopters, and Lockheed Martin’s S-70M Black Hawk.
Airbus hopes that a deal with the UK could open the way for H175M export sales, with a market of around 500 “platforms in specific countries” of interest, according to Brown.
“There’s already demand signals coming from some of them,” he explained, without mentioning individual nations.
The UK had also been expected to retire the Puma fleet in 2025, leaving industry potentially faced with a compressed NMH production timeline, though Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, Chief of the Air Staff, told lawmakers in May that an extension to 2027 or 2028 could be made.
Brown expressed few concerns about any potential shifts to production timelines.
“All we need to do is press the button [at Broughton] and we can immediately procure jigs and tools,” he explained. “Basic systems and training are all in place so it won’t take very long to set production up and start cranking the handle.”