Aug 12 2005
BAE Systems has signed a major sub-contract with Northrop Grumman to play a key partner role on the E-3D Sentry Whole Life Support programme announced today. BAE Systems’ role will be to provide depth maintenance, ground maintenance training and on-line technical information under an agreement expected to be worth in the order of £100m over the life of the programme.
Within the contract, BAE Systems is also responsible for the construction of a new hangar annex within the grounds of RAF Waddington, which is being built to co-locate the 150 people that will be moving on-base to deliver the holistic service provision.
“We believe this is a major step forward in partnered support in the UK,” said Kevin Taylor, managing director for CS&S’s military air business. “It provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate our support capability on a third party platform as we apply the experience from our Nimrod and VC10 integrated support contracts to improve E-3D availability within a challenging budget.”
The Sentry is the UK’s principal early warning and control aircraft and provides vital strategic support to the UK armed forces in operations around the world. The RAF operates seven of the Boeing 707-based aircraft at RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, and the contract supports the aircraft through to the out-of-service date, which will be in the mid 2020s.
It is envisaged that implementing the Sentry future support programme will reduce the cost of supporting Sentry over the next two decades by up to 20 per cent, a significant saving for the taxpayer.
The technical information will be delivered through the CS&S Integrated Asset Management (IAM) service also scheduled for implementation on Nimrod MR2 support and Tornado support and upgrade. The IAM service incorporates access via CS&S’s trilogiView technical browser, already chosen for 26 other UK MOD programmes and by Lockheed Martin for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
FR Aviation Services, a subsidiary of Cobham’s Flight Operations and Services Group, will be the maintenance provider on E-3D under a partnering agreement with CS&S.
This latter agreement is based on the relationship FR Aviation Services and CS&S have developed supporting the Nimrod fleet at RAF Kinloss for the Defence Logistics Organisation.
Under the £75m NISC (Nimrod Integrated Support Contract), availability of the Nimrod MR2 fleet is up by 40 per cent while support costs are down by 8 per cent.
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