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New presidential helicopter on hold

The most trying moment for the VH-71 presidential helicopter came in the twilight of what had already been a rocky year for the program.

After cost increases and schedule problems — driven in part by nearly 2,000 requirement changes — DoD officials met Dec. 13 with the White House Military Office to discuss the program’s fate.

The following day rumors abounded that the program faced cancellation, but the Pentagon swatted away speculation.

“There has been no decision to terminate the program,” Bill Balderson, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for aviation programs, said Dec. 14. “We’re continuing to look at all the options. We’ve looked at almost every conceivable option because we didn’t want to take anything off the table.”

Sources suggested that the Pentagon wanted to kill the program, which reportedly has grown from $7 billion to $11 billion, but was overruled by the White House.

Neither White House nor Pentagon officials could discuss details of the meeting, but one source said that after all options were discussed, the decision was made to move ahead with the program.

A team composed of Lockheed Martin, AgustaWestland and Bell Helicopter Textron won the contract with the US101 in 2005, but rising costs and engineering glitches slowed development and raised concerns in the Pentagon.

A critical design review found that the Increment 1 aircraft met the needs of the first phase of the program, but an April systems requirements review revealed that nearly 2,000 design changes would be needed to meet Pentagon requirements for the second round of aircraft. The changes included a new tail, transmission and rotor blades.

“Increment 1 was a different program, a different airplane,” Balderson said. “There was an underestimation at the outset of how much work and how much time it was going to take to meet the requirements.”

With Lockheed’s ability to meet the 2015 delivery deadline for Increment 2 aircraft in doubt, the program has been essentially put on hold while options are considered.