Training change

Most of the major players in Australia’s defence industry have announced teamings or that they will stand alone for these contracts, with the Phase 7 teamings including BAE Systems with AgustaWestland and CAE with the AW109 GrandNew; Boeing Defence Australia and Thales Australia; Raytheon Australia with Bell Helicopters and Hawker Pacific with the Bell 429; and Lockheed Martin with Bristow Helicopters; while Eurocopter subsidiary Australian Aerospace is yet to announce any teaming arrangement and may go it alone with its EC135/EC635.

For Air 5428, Raytheon Australia has teamed with BAE Systems and Hawker Beechcraft to offer the Beechcraft T-6C, while Pilatus – which already has a teaming with Lockheed Martin for Singapore’s Basic Wings course based at Pearce – is yet to announce any teaming to offer its PC-21 to Australia.

The Air 9000 Phase 7 project is expected to release a Request for Tender (RFT) either late this year or early next, with a decision to be made sometime in 2012. The Air 5428 schedule looks to be running about 12 months behind that, for service entry from 2016/17. The push to combine and centralise as much of the ADF’s flying training has obvious synergies.

But Australian Aviation understands that there is still much work to be done to bring all three branches of the ADF onto the same ‘hymn sheet’ in order to be able to publish clearly defined projects goals and requirements. Army was believed to have considered skipping all but the initial flight screening stages of BFTS and taking its pilots instead straight to rotary winged training, and was therefore pushing for a more basic helicopter training platform to learn on before stepping up to the more powerful and complex twin engined machines the Phase 7 tender will likely specify.

But halving the projected pilot throughput out of BFTS by taking Army out of the equation has obvious ramifications for the number of aircraft and size of the contract for Air 5428. Fewer fixed wing training aircraft and associated services would be required, the training services footprint would be smaller, and thus some economies of scale are unlikely to be realised. More recently it is believed Army has come back to the fold and will send its pilots through BFTS after all, although the exact ‘jump off’ point to helicopter training remains yet to be determined.

A September Phase 7 industry brief confirmed the Commonwealth had moved away from the previously mooted Private Finance Initiative (PFI) model which would have required significant upfront investment by industry, and instead it will acquire the aircraft and own the training facilities itself, and it is expected Air 5428 will go the same way.

But industry will still have a big role to play, in that, like the current BFTS arrangement, it is likely a large component of both projects will see training services, aircraft and synthetic devices availability, courseware and other key items contracted for a set minimum number of hours each month/year, with surge options in place.