Sunday, November 2, 2008

Revisiting the EC-725 Saga

While it is perfectly justifiable to call for credible probity regarding any perceived or alleged impropriety and irregularity in the process of selecting the winner for the project to replace the Royal Malaysian Air Force’s (RMAF) Sikorsky-built S-61A-4 ‘Nuris’, the outright hostile and ill-informed postures adopted by member-parties of the ‘Pakatan Rakyat’ (PR) political coalition over the past week have, regrettably, revealed a dismal lack of knowledge and understanding of the methodologies applied for taking enlightened and informed decisions for procuring military hardware to sustain the force modernisation programmes of the Malaysian Armed Forces. Two instances of the PR’s flawed logic are highlighted below.

1) Contrary to what has been popularly claimed by some quarters, the process of selecting a replacement for the ‘Nuri’ did not commence with merely the floating of global tenders last year, but as far back as 2003, when an initial Staff Paper was prepared by RMAF HQ. This Staff Paper had by late 2004 been refined into a Position Paper and a year later had matured into an Air Staff Target. By 2006 this had morphed into the definitive Air Staff Requirement (ASQR) and it was only after this that global tenders were floated last November and a Technical Negotiations Committee (TNC) was established. The TNC’s members hailed from the RMAF, MINDEF and Ministry of Finance (MoF). Subject to a shortlisting of potential candidates (which in this case were Eurocopter’s EC-725 Cougar Mk2+, AgustaWestland’s AW-101 and Rosoboronexport’s Mi-17V-5), the TNC would next have identified the ultimate winner (which turned out to be the EC-725) by issuing a Letter of Intent (issued on September 15), following which a Price Negotiations Committee (PNC) would have to be created jointly by MINDEF and the MoF to visit Eurocopter’s facilities for on-site physical verifications (and not for flight evaluations or flight-tests, which were already conducted in April 2006 and December 2007 over a period totaling three weeks) and after that, negotiate the definitive sales & purchase contract. Following this, a Project Monitoring Team comprising personnel from MINDEF and the RMAF would have been raised to monitor and oversee project implementation and service induction of the new helicopters.

2) Nowhere has it been officially stated by MINDEF or RMAF HQ that a physical evaluation of the selected or shortlisted helicopters is MANDATORY prior to selecting the winner. In fact, it is an universally accepted practice to undertake physical evaluations of military hardware ONLY in cases where the hardware being offered is still a prototype and has not yet been ordered in bulk by a launch customer. And it was for this very reason that prior to ordering the Su-30MKM multi-role air dominance combat aircraft, the RMAF, from May 27 to June 4, 2001, had dispatched a flight evaluation team to Russia to a) verify the aircraft’s flight performance and handling qualities when firing guided/unguided weapons, verify the aircraft’s open-architecture avionics suite, verify the aircraft’s ground maintenance concepts, verify the aircraft’s specified integrated logistics system; and verify the aircraft’s aircrew training package and the technical type-training package for the ground crews. This type of on-site evaluation was done on board a generic Su-30MK, as the Su-30MKM being offered then had existed only on paper, and was later developed over a three-year period AFTER the procurement contract had been inked by mid-2003. In contrast, the EC-725, AW-101 and Mi-17V-5 are all in the series-production phase since 2004 and therefore no amount of physical flight/ground evaluations of these helicopters would have enabled the RMAF to gain any additional insights to the RMAF other than what has already been documented by Eurocopter, AgustaWestland and Rosoboronexport thus far.

Interestingly, even in India, when there was a recent three-cornered competition between the AW-101, Mi-17V-5 and Sikorsky’s S-92 underway to supply 12 VVIP transportation helicopters worth €600 million, the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) TNC conducted only an in-house evaluation of the competing tender bids, which subsequently established that between the three contenders the AW-101 came out as the preferred candidate due to its ‘fully ASQR compliant’ status. Only AFTER this did the IAF issue a Letter of Intent (LoI) to AgustaWestland and later dispatched its TNC to visit AgustaWestland’s UK-based industrial facilities in Yeovil to verify AgustaWestland’s tender submissions, following which a PNC was constituted.

In conclusion, if those parties presently claiming to represent the true national interests of Malaysia want to demonstrate their genuineness in terms of consistent adherence to public probity in matters concerning major government contracts, then they have to shrug off their xenophobic, politically motivated hostility and instead ask MINDEF for constructive explanations regarding the following:

1) In what way will the contract award to Eurocopter benefit Malaysia in terms of making the country a regional aerospace industrial hub for rotary-winged aircraft?

2) What is the quantum and type of direct and indirect industrial offsets being offered by Eurocopter through EADS, its parent company?

3) To what extent is Eurocopter prepared to fully localise the EC-725’s maintenance, repair and overhaul activities and over what time-frame?

4) What will be the future status of the RMAF’s existing 26 S-61A-4 Nuris? Given the fact that these helicopters have each logged in no more than 10,000 flight hours and are good to go another 40,000 hours, can these Nuris be upgraded and be transferred to the Royal Malaysian Navy, Malaysian Army or the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency?--Prasun K. Sengupta

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

eh 101 is much bigger than ec725,
nh90,ch148

eh 101 is best choise for indian navy cuz it has unmatched range,payload and sensores,and its from a single country UK

v have sea king from uk so in my opinion eh 101 could b front runner

Anonymous said...

Prasun, desperately awaiting your post on the Arjun Tank.......

Prasun K Sengupta said...

Arrived at Zhuhai via Shanghai yesterday to cover the Airshow China 2008 expo over the next 4 days.

Anonymous said...

prasun, there has been some media reports regarding kaveri being completed and flight trials on board lca by 2009...........can you throw some light on ambiguity surrounding this topic. thanks in advance

Prasun K Sengupta said...

Flight trials of the Kaveri's series-production variant will not start until 2015 for two simple reasons: 1) the thrust needs to be uprated and only by this December will be known how exactly to go about it. 2) The turbine blades on the existing Kaveri are made using the directionally solidified technique, which since the late 1980s has been superceded by single crystal blade manufacturing technique. Neither GTRE nor MIDHANI have as yet mastered this technique of blade manufacturing and industrial know-how required for mastering this technology is not available from imported sources. Therefore, the Kaveri turbofan has a long way to go before being flight-qualified on the Tejas LCA.

Anonymous said...

who paid 4 ur air ticket to china sengupta?

Prasun K Sengupta said...

All expenses paid-trip courtesy of my own company TRIDENT Aviation Services. No donations or sponsorships from anyone/anybody.

Anonymous said...

DID U PUBLISH THIS IN SOME MALAYSIAN MEDIA LIKE MALAYSIAKINI LIKE LAST TIME????????

ANYWAY WHAT DOES THIS TRIDENT A.S. DO? IS IT A MAINTENANCE FACILITY FOR HELICOPTERS???? WHERE IS IT LOCATED???

Anonymous said...

does Trident refurbish old planes? if yes please let me know and i will give u my email id. i have an old beechcraft prop plane in a barn and i am looking for somebody to help me get it in working order.

Anonymous said...

pls open the star today in letters section gotta guy who wrote about cons of buying EC helos. please reply to that letter bombarding em'

maurice said...

No excuse not to have the physical evaluation as mandatory in the NURI replacement tender exercise.

Each company must be willing to send its helicopter to be evaluated in the Malaysian environment/terrain according to the operational requirements of the RMAF.

Only then we would know the true capability of the contending helicopters.

Anonymous said...

pakatan will do anything opposition is supposed to do: oppose. good or bad. but they r no better. we saw how well they handled the zakaria-mansion case didn't we. assholes saying "nothing wrong was done by zakaria" my foot! then why did that zakaria apologise to the PM sometime ago? If nothing wrong why apologise? Citizen Nadesan's column in the Sun was really good. He blasted the buggers. In fact I heard from someone that zakaria actually commited suicide after knowing BN lost. Not sure if it is false news but it is flying around. Anyway coming back to the point you shd write a letter in the star and highlight your points. or perhaps email citizen nadesan with your points. he'll blast those buggers on your behalf. end of the day, why isn't pm (who's also def minister) not giving these points u highlighted? looks like he may also not be sure of the tendering protocols heheheheh, isnt it sengupta

Anonymous said...

boy r u the same one who was in the middle of the pelangi scandal sometime ago? you know, dato devamany, sangupta, harun.. are you the same sangupta?