Issue 349: Hats Off

Although designing HATS has not been without its challenges and the project is still facing schedule pressures, the training system will be “truly awesome” once it is up and running, according to Stuart Harwood, JP 9000 Phase 7 project director at the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG) within Defence.

“I have been involved with HATS since 2010, and that has taken us through the tendering, through the negotiations and contracting, and now into delivery,” Harwood says in an interview with Australian Aviation.

“I just marvel at what we are doing; the system is going to be quite awesome.

“And we have got a very, very mature suite of major mission systems like the EC135 helicopter and the Thales simulators, which are really, really impressive devices to be used for training students.”

The new training system will prepare Australian Army and Royal Australian Navy (RAN) students for conversion to operational helicopter types, replacing training using the Kiowa and Squirrel helicopters.

The HATS project is currently at the courseware development stage.

“Our training management packages, which describes the courseware we provide to our students, has all been drafted and agreed by the Commonwealth that it meets what we want, and now Boeing are into the process of developing and verifying all the individual learning packages, so for instance the flights that they go and do,” Harwood explains.

“We are well into that process now, and that is involving both Boeing staff, who do the development work, and Commonwealth aircrew, who participate in peer reviews of the lessons to see how they are progressing.”

The EC135 T2+ training helicopter (which is a member of the civil H135 family of light, twin-engine helicopters) is being introduced in stages as required; at present, there are six available to fly at any given time, which is sufficient to allow testing of the system and support the verification work.

“This is something I found very interesting, buying a helicopter, I had not seen on the military side,” says Harwood, who spent 33 years in the RAN before becoming a public servant.

“You go over to Airbus Helicopters and they say: here is our basic helicopter. It is a bit like buying a car in the showroom, they then give you the book with the options.”

The first helicopter for HATS (N52-001) completed its first flight from Airbus Helicopters’ Donauwörth site in Germany in January 2015, and Airbus announced in November last year that the final six of 15 helicopters had been accepted by Boeing.

“Our aircraft can look different to other EC135s [elsewhere] in the world, but it is simply because we have chosen a different option set,” Harwood says.

“Probably the only thing that we have had fitted that was specific to us; well, it is an option out of the company, but I doubt many take it up these days, was fitting the Automatic Direction Finding system, because we still have the associated navigation system in Australia.”

Meanwhile, two of the three EC135 Reality H full flight simulators being provided by Thales have arrived (the third is not yet needed), and in coming months the simulators will be put through an independent qualification process to confirm that they are qualified to Level B.

“Boeing and the Commonwealth sent a combined crew over to France to have a look at the system, and we found as we used the device, in its current form, areas that needed improvement to best support the training system,” Harwood says.

“All of those have been taken on board by the contractors, and the software has either been fixed now or will be fixed before the simulator is qualified.”

Various other synthetic training devices have either been installed or are in the process of being installed, and testing of these systems has commenced.

Trial courses

HATS is set to launch with the start of trial courses for student pilots and aircrewmen in January 2018. Initial operational capability (IOC) is expected to be achieved in September 2018, and final operational capability (FOC) is anticipated by September 2020.

“Those courses will be overseen by an independent verification and validation contractor,” Harwood says. “We will have a person coming in saying: Commonwealth, this is what you think you are buying; Boeing, this is what you have developed, are they the same thing?

“And at the end of the trial courses is when the training management packages are accepted by Navy, and that is what constitutes initial operational capability, because that is the point that we can go out and say: the course does what the course is supposed to do, we can now move into the mature operation of the course.”

‘HATS is set to launch with the start of trial courses in January 2018.’

While these first student courses are referred to as ‘trial’ courses, for the participating Army and Navy students themselves this will very much be the real deal.

“We are confident [the trial courses] will produce pilots and aircrewmen that can move straight on to operational flying training,” Harwood says.

“It is the mature product that we will verify does everything from a contractual point of view and then move into providing that course to following students.

“The big thing is, like any training system, HATS is an evolutionary system; it will never reach a point from which further improvement is not possible.

“As we gain more experience with the synthetic devices we may choose to leverage them more in the training system; as new techniques for training come in we may choose to change the training courses. So the trial courses produce the baseline course that will evolve over the next 25 years.”

The system will have a maximum annual intake of 132 students, which includes ab initio students (pilots, aircrewmen and aviation warfare officers coming out of basic training) that will subsequently undertake a conversion course for an operational helicopter type, as well as Instructor Training Wing students that once qualified will teach on the EC135 T2+ at the Joint Helicopter School.

The school will be staffed by a mix of Boeing and Commonwealth instructors. Five contractor instructors and eight ADF qualified flying instructors and qualified aircrewman instructors have started type conversion training, Boeing stated in March.

Schedule pressures

While the Joint Helicopter School is on track to accept students from early 2018, the HATS project is dealing with schedule pressures as the start date fast approaches, the CASG project director explains.

“We still have schedule pressures, there is no doubt,” Harwood acknowledges.

“Boeing and the Commonwealth are working collaboratively to make sure that the schedule delays in some elements do not impact the overall provision of capability. My customers, who are Army and Navy, have capability milestones they need to achieve and that is initial operational capability and final operational capability.

“We have experienced some delays in development of certain areas, such as availability of mission systems has not necessarily been what Boeing had expected back in November 2014 when the contract was signed.

“So the Commonwealth and Boeing are now working collaboratively to make sure that we achieve the capability milestones and we manage that within some of the schedule pressures we have had on getting systems delivered.

“Basically, it is Project Management 101. You have a plan at the start, you get perturbations in the plan and you work together to make sure those perturbations do not impact the final outcome, either in quality or timeliness.”

In terms of risk, the JP 9000 Phase 7 project is considered to be an ‘Australianised’ commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) acquisition.

“We are not the most expensive project, and technically we are not a complex project,” Harwood says. “We are not technologically pushing any boundaries.

“From the point of view of developing the training and support system, some of it is new to the company. And we went for a process where Boeing is responsible really for the design, development and delivery of the whole system, which is a different approach than we have previously taken with the delivery of helicopter training.

“There was a vision back in November 2014 of what was needed and when it was needed, and as we have moved through the development process some of that timing just has not worked for us.”

As an example, Harwood describes how the development and approval processes of the HATS project “got out of sync” with a separate effort to procure the Multirole Aviation Training Vessel (MATV), saying that the MV Sycamore was expected to be available for use by HATS “long before” it actually will be. However, this is no longer a concern.

“We have arrived at a plan that says: well, we can still do everything we need to do with the MATV before we start the trial courses, so the impact on getting to the capability milestone of IOC is not at risk,” Harwood says.

The MATV concept is the result of the merging of the HATS requirement with a requirement to replace the training vessel Seahorse Horizon.

The 94-metre-long MATV is being acquired to support a range of ADF training activities including initial helicopter deck landing qualifications, and the vessel is expected to be available to support EC135 T2+ flying operations in the fourth quarter of this year.

Under current plans, the HATS EC135 helicopter will only be qualified with the MATV to support ab initio training. But the vessel will also be capable of operating the MH-60R Seahawk ‘Romeo’ and the MRH90 multirole helicopter, and first-of-class flight trials for these types are scheduled for early 2018.

Besides being used for deck landing qualifications, the MATV is being procured to support other training activities such as at-sea familiarisation, practice weapon recovery and navigation training, as well as for limited fleet support duties.

Damen Shipyards Group announced on April 20 that Sycamore has completed sea trials, having been launched in Vietnam in August last year. The vessel is expected to arrive in Sydney at the end of May.