If You Thought The VHX Marine One Contract Was Big, Just Hang On...

By ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien

Coming out of Heli-Expo, everyone is talking about the way that European manufacturers have been cleaning American clocks in the contract stakes. Now, there is a new contract looming on the horizon, one that is certain to see a European win, as both of the competitors are largely European. They will put on some American fig leaves as Agusta-Westland did to win the VHX contract, but large parts of this contract will go across the pond, no matter who wins.

The contract is for the new Army fixed-wing transport plane, and the two contenders are Alenia-Lockheed's C-27J, whose roots are mostly in Italy, and EADS's C-295, which has a Spanish background. The Army wants to buy 33 airplanes and retire the C-23s by 2011; this rapid schedule is what's driving the Pentagon towards off-the-shelf airplanes.

Historical Background

Prior to 1966, the US Army operated a fleet of fixed-wing STOL aircraft to service remote Special Forces camps. In that year, a turf battle with the Air Force was resolved by the Army handing over its DHC-4 Caribou airlifters to the Air Force, which immediately began planning to phase them out, and replaced them with... nothing. For many years the Army operated no light cargo planes, partly because they were trying to hold the USAF to its end of the 1966 agreement, and partly because Army Aviation is in the grip of helicopter pilots, who tried to replace the C-7 (as the military termed the Caribou) with copters.

In recent years, the Army National Guard has operated a small fleet of Shorts C-23 Sherpas (line art, above) in a variety of roles. But they have increasingly been pressed into service as light airlifters. The Army, in which even conventional units now operate more like Special Forces, finds itself valuing that lost Caribou capability, and the Air Force still isn't interested in providing it.

So the Army has decided that, no matter how irritated this makes its brethren in blue, it's going to buy some cargo planes. Big enough to haul what the green machine needs hauled, but not so big as the Air Force's C-130s.

Why Not Just Buy More C-23s?

It's cold to say this, but: if it could do the job, the Army probably would. The Sherpa is as unloved as it is unlovely. It is slow, flies low (it's unpressurized), and despite looking like it ought to be hell-for-STOL, it's anything but, needing long runways to heave itself uncertainly into the air. While some pilots grow to love them, as happens with any aircraft, others are more critical. Passengers who travel in the noisy, drafty cargo bays liken it to being trapped in the middle of a practicing gong orchestra on a Tibetan mountaintop -- maybe that's where the name "Sherpa" comes from, because the plane does not achieve the feats of labor at high altitude that brought fame to its namesakes.

A well-publicized C-23 inflight breakup has contributed to the low confidence in the airframe. The breakup seems to have resulted from flight into thunderstorm conditions, but a celebrated lawsuit has considerably muddied the causative waters in the public eye, claiming essentially that the plane was so poorly built it just fell apart in the air. Again, from the official accident report, no such thing seems to have happened, but the perception counts -- and it's not as if the Sherpa had a lot of sterling qualities to build crew loyalty.

The C-23 has also been poor at fulfilling one of its basic missions: paratroop training. For much of the machine's Army career, it has been restricted from conducting parachute operations, especially static-line operations, due to a slew of safety problems. (At this writing it is cleared for s/l drops again).

The C-23 was never meant to do the jobs it's doing now. The National Guard bought a fleet of them, explicitly for parachute training of airborne troops, especially the two Guard Special Forces groups. The plane's bug-bruising cruise speed (around 180 kt), altitude aversion, and girly-man weightlifting capacity are not factors when all you're doing is lifting groups of paratroops to low four-digit (or high three-digit) altitudes for static line parachute jumps. But while that was the plan, the relatively low profile of the Guard SF units meant that the C-23s were assigned to OSACOM, the Operational Support Aircraft Command, which mostly flies VIPs around in military bizjets. The Sherpas gave OSACOM a cargo-lifting capability that the command hadn't had before, and for that they're welcome, but they're a lot slower than FEDEX. On the plus side, with their simple systems and bulletproof PT-6 engines, they're a lot more easily maintained than more sophisticated planes. Maintenance of the Sherpas is contracted out (at the moment, to Bombardier).

The Sherpa has served well in Iraq, but its inability to climb out of the range of insurgent anti-aircraft weapons means that it normally flies at 100 feet AGL -- which is wearying for the crews. So far, low-and-flat-out has worked, and no Sherpa has taken hits. Moreover, while the plane itself has its limits, the concept of what it's doing -- responsive, highly available airlift -- has whetted the Army's appetite for its own cargo fleet. Ironically, the Sherpa's greatest success, its doughty performance in the intra-theater mission in Iraq, is the final nail in its coffin.

The C-27J and C-295 may not have been "invented here," but neither was the C-23, which was built by Shorts Bros. in Northern Ireland. It starts life as a Shorts 360 airliner and is converted to cargo configuration by an add-on kit.

In This Corner, The C-27J

The C-27 Spartan was designed by Lockheed Martin and Alenia (formerly Aeritalia). It resembles a scaled-down C-130J in a number of ways, and in a couple of significant ways it is. It has C-130J engines and a cockpit where any current-model Hercules pilot would be instantly at home. But the bulk of the airplane is the Alenia G-222, an airplane that's flown for Italy and other operators for some 35 years. The US Air Force operated the G-222 as the C-27A for nine years in a specialty cargo mission in Central and South America; when the US stopped supporting the Panama Canal in 1999, the 10 American G-222s were stored at AMARC. Over 100 G-222s in all were sold worldwide.

A much more modern powerplant is the secret to the C-27Js performance advantage over the ill-fated A model. The C-27J is equipped with two 4,637 SHP Rolls-Royce AE 2100D3 turboprop engines with Dowty six-bladed composite propellers -- essentially half a C-130J's powerplant.

The Spartan is also robust, with its normal operating envelope extending to +3.0g, significantly more than other airlift airframes. (The -1 for the C-130 limits pilots to +2.0 and -0 g!). Its 315 kt cruise speed is 55 knots faster than the CN-295s latest stated max cruise speed (and until recently, EADS was saying 245 kt).

The C-27J is a bigger airplane than the C-295, and that translates both into comfort for the crew and performance for the mission. The cross section of the cargo area is about seven by eleven feet. Higher, heavier and faster it can do -- and that means it has more oomph to spare for short fields. At MTOW of 66,0000 lbs, it can take off from a 1,600 foot field over a 50-foot obstacle. It also has greater unrefueled range -- over 1,000 miles greater.

The C-27J has a nearly unique cargo-handling trick: its hydraulics can make the plane "kneel" to ease loading and unloading, or match the height of a truck or K-loader.

The only sales to date are 12 airplanes to Italy, and a similar quantity to Greece. It is believed to have the inside track for Canada's DHC-5 Buffalo SAR replacement.

And In This Corner, The C-295

The C-295 of EADS has as tangled an ancestry as the European aerospace giant itself. It's a stretch of the CN-235 which was originally a Spanish/Indonesian partnership in an aircraft that is itself a stretched, pressurized, descendant of the venerable CASA C-212. The Indonesian partner, IPTN, is out of the program, and it's all-European now, run by EADS's Spanish subsidiary, CASA. Compared to the C-27J, the C-295 is a better bargain all round as well -- it has lower acquisition and operating costs. Its smaller cousin, the CN-235, is entering Coast Guard service as the next generation maritime patrol aircraft. Over 250 CN-235s are flying, and scores of C-295s have been sold in the last few years.

The C-295 has already been completely developed for European-style (and Navy-style) pod-and drogue air refueling, which may not matter to the Army (but probably should). It also has an integrated defensive system, with radar warning, chaff and flares. It may not have quite the cubes or lifting capacity of the Spartan, but it is a great deal cleaner economically. To see this, compare the sponsons into which the main landing gear retract. The C-27J's resemble, what else?, the C-130 -- which had its first flight in 1954. A close look at the slick, ultra-streamlined sponson on the C-295 and you can see that EADS aerodynamicists have been much less complacent than those at Alenia or Lockheed.

If the C-295 is so clean, why is it so slow? Its 260 knots is still a quantum leap over the sluggish C-23, but it isn't the speed demon (or the altitude king) that the C-27J is. Why not? The guilty party is the powerplant: the C-295 has Pratt & Whitney Canada PW127G engines, driving Hamilton Standard 568F-5 six-bladed propellers. The PW127 is best known for providing the motive power of the DHC-8 Dash 8. These great engines yield "only" 2,645 SHP each, compared to the 4,637 of the C-27J's Rolls-Royce plants. (Just to add to the confusion, the engine with the venerable British name is American, and the one with the great American name is Canadian. Got that?). That lower power translates, of course, into much less guzzling of fuel; but also less speed, altitude, and longer runway requirements. The C-295 needs 2,700 feet to clear a 50' obstacle.

The C-295 has had good success in the marketplace, with Poland, Switzerland, Malaysia, the UAE, Jordan, the UAE, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia all buying some. Greece came close before choosing the C-27J, and all around the world these two very similar, but very different, airlifters have been going head-to-head in the last couple of years.

Analysis: Do We Dare Make A Prediction?

Army special operations forces are already familiar with the source planes, the G-222 and the CN-235 (not to mention that the Army's special operators regularly employ contractor-operated CASA 212s both at Bragg and in the combat theater). And indeed, both are good planes; the only bad decision the Army can make is to stick with the Sherpa.

If either plane is selected, and the build quantity remains as high as projected, the machines might be assembled in the USA. But the Army wants these planes quickly -- beginning this year. So at least the initial order will be assembled overseas. However, Alenia can only build 16 C-27s a year, and is committed to 12 airframes for AMI (the Italian air force), and a dozen or more for Greece. That means that some C-27s might have to be built in the USA, or risk losing the order to EADS which could probably produce all 33 CN-295s in under two years if need be. The Army doesn't really need the planes that quickly -- it will take time to train crews, and it can still fly the Sherpas for now (but once either of these planes gets into inventory, expect unrest from the remaining Sherpa pilots and loadmasters). EADS has already acquired a 13,000 SF facility in Mobile, AL, for maintenance of the 235s the USCG is buying, and has engaged in preliminary talks about an assembly plant in South Carolina.

Another wild card is interservice politics: specifically, the attitude of the US Air Force. Forty years ago, the USAF was bitterly opposed to the Army operating cargo aircraft -- but the USAF proved to be even more hostile to the idea of supporting the Army with intra-theater airlift. The blue suits are now riven by the dual possibility, of losing part of their "union shop" to the Army, but in return getting rid of a mission that they never wanted and that they only performed in the most grudging and perfunctory fashion. In this, the Army's years of operation of the Sherpas help. The Air Force never would have wanted such a slow, flimsy, unpressurized dog, and so they didn't develop a lot of jealousy over it. And they have had time to learn that Big Green still calls Big Blue for the things that count -- the paratroops.

WIth the planes quite evenly matched, and either one being a quantum leap forward from the rickety Sherpa, the decision will be made based on the few large differences that there are -- so it will come down to what the army weights more heavily: the robustness and performance of the Spartan, or the efficiency of the CN-295?

I believe that the Army will select the C-27J Spartan, and that the key reason will be its superior short-field performance. (I also believe that no pilot will EVER land one on an airfield where the EADS plane couldn't land and take off in perfect safety). And I believe that the C-27J will sell to those operators for whom price is no object, and the C-295 will do great among those nations that worry about the size of their fuel bill.

And by 2007 you'll be buying Revere Ware that used to be a C-23 Sherpa... and that's not a bad thing.

FMI: www.c295-tour.com, www.c-27j.ca/index.php?lang_id=1