By Aimée Turner at Farnborough air show
US manufacturer targets overseas partners to produce international variant
Sikorsky is to link with several international partners to produce overseas a more affordable version of its Black Hawk medium-lift utility rotorcraft.
Speaking at Farnborough, Sikorsky president Jeff Pino said the US rotorcraft manufacturer was targeting up to four industrial partners to produce a 10t International Black Hawk - a multi-mission aircraft in the price range of 6-8t helicopters.
Sikorsky plans to build, assemble and deliver the aircraft outside the USA by early 2010, allowing the company to focus on domestic military production while achieving its long-term strategic objective of developing international operations and supplier base expansion.
Designed with a digital cockpit and four-axis advanced flight control system, active vibration controls and dual-pilot instrument flight rules capability as standard, the aircraft is essentially a hybrid of its UH-60M and L models.
| Sikorsky wants up to four partners for overseas production of Black Hawk |
"Basically, we are targeting global customers who have different needs and a different spend, but it will be a Black Hawk, make no mistake about it," said Pino.
"With price over gross weight, it's an extremely linear path, and yet these aircraft will have a 10t capability at a 6t price. We like that combination: L model performance with M model capability, which makes it much more affordable for some nations," he said.
Regarding the high levels of existing product development at Sikorsky, Pino said. "You may well ask: why now? Well, good companies expand in periods of growth and that's what we are doing here. The International Black Hawk is a variant of a couple of our aircraft - it holds no great surprises in terms of design, but stresses more the supplier side with our developing of global partnerships."
He said Sikorsky will announce candidate partners within six months and that they will each have existing industrial capability; will be operating within a sound socio-political environment; and will be running their own industrial programmes.
"Putting together these three or four partners will mean establishing a powerful supply chain. We don't ever envisage selling it domestically," he said.
Pino added that foreign market demand for the Black Hawk was huge and that Sikorsky had between 60 and 80 orders at the Congressional notification stage.
Source: Flight International
