$110.5-Million Deal Brings Total TH-73A Acquisitions to 130
In January 2020, the AgustaWestland Philadelphia Corporation—a wholly owned subsidiary of Leonardo, the Italian multinational company specializing in aerospace, defense, and security—was awarded a contract for the production and delivery of 32 TH-73A helicopters, along with spares, support, dedicated equipment, and specific pilot/maintenance training services.
The machines born of the $176-million dollar deal would be used to train future generations of U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard helicopter pilots.
Ten months later, in November 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) ordered a second lot of 36 TH-73A helicopters through a $171-million contract modification.
In December 2021, a third lot of TH-73A helicopters—now nicknamed the Thrasher—was ordered through a $159.4-million contract modification.
That the TH-73A has found enduring favor with Pentagon brass is evinced by a 24 December 2022 U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) announcement that AgustaWestland Philadelphia Corporation has been awarded yet another TH-73A procurement contract. The $110.5-million deal will see an additional 26 Thrashers produced and delivered by 2024.
The TH-73 will replace the U.S. Navy’s TH-57 Sea Ranger fleet. Venerable but aging, the TH-57 derives of Bell’s highly-successful, patently ubiquitous, 206 Jet Ranger.
Itself a variant of AgustaWestland’s AW119Kx, the TH-73A is a single-engine, full-spectrum training aircraft developed in compliance with the requirements of the Pentagon’s Advanced Helicopter Training System (AHTS) program. AHTS set out to improve pilot training and skills through the utilization of contemporary cockpit technologies and modernized training curricula consistent with the capabilities of the U.S. Navy’s, Marine Corps’, and Coast Guard’s extant rotary-wing inventories. The TH-73A is powered by Pratt and Whitney’s one-thousand-shaft-horsepower PT6B-37A turboshaft engine, which handily motivates the 3,325-pound aircraft to a maximum speed of 152-knots and a service-ceiling of 15,000-feet. The Thrasher’s range of 357-nautical-miles provides instructors an ample training radius in which to heap equal measures of abuse and erudition onto tomorrow’s helicopter aviators—squids, jarheads, and Coasties alike.
By dint of a skills-based approach to training, just-in-time acquisition practices, and the incorporation of the TH-73A’s bleeding-edge technologies and broad capabilities, AHTS seeks to efficiently produce high-quality aviators capable of meeting the challenges of 21st Century rotary-wing operations across both combat and peacetime missions.
NTSB Final Report: Aviat A1
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