Slightly OT: NY Times on Marine One helicopter program

From what I've heard part of the problem is the USN being incredibly secretive about what's going in the aircraft.
E.g. we want to put a box this big here and giving no more information than that, then a few months later they'll say oh and it needs an AC feed and an aerial which means another redesign. Secrecy is all well and good but it does make it tricky to finalise an aircraft design if the goalposts keep moving!
 
also why are they letting the navy build it?? in my mind you have 3 services which are good at their own areas so:

want something blown up from the ground and/or country invaded = call the army
want the latest aircraft = call the air force
want a new sub that cant crash into other subs = call the navy

Also what happend to the goverment releaseing a spec to designers and say "bring us what you can do" then choseing the best one?? why change a tried and tested method? .. o yea .. polotics and the generals who want medals and honours :monkies:
 
Err.. the Navy are in charge of the program because it's a Marines operated aircraft (the Marines are part of the Navy not the Army). The US Air Force in fact operates very few helicopters and like all air forces has very little interest in anything that isn't pointy and goes really fast.
They actually did do a competition for the VH-71 program, it was between the Sikorsky S-92 and the EH-101. The 101 won, however at that stage they really didn't have the full specs of the program just a few basic ideas like performance envelope and size of the cabin (the latter being where the 101 really excelled), this was due to the desire to replace the ageing Sea King airframes as rapidly as possible.
 
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