Page 35 - Australian Defence Magazine Oct 2020

certainty of schedule; all those have been proven and there’s a long history and track record of all three of those,” Jamison said.
In terms of capability, the Apache has grown into a lot of its current capabilities over time. The constant spiral upgrade approach has seen a number of communication and weapons technologies added over the years.
“There’s a few very unique capabilities because it’s the only attack helicopter in the world that has these four unique ca- pabilities,” Jamison explained to ADM. “A lot of our competitors claim they can do it but they haven’t done it and anything with aviation requires a lot engineering, a lot of testing, a lot of cost; so if you haven’t done it there’s a huge cost to getting some of these capabilities.”
The Apache has access to Link 16, VMF and a number of tactical data links that the ADF already has in service.
“The FMS elements are always difficult because you get this quality and certainty of schedule and certainty of cost that comes with buying FMS,” Glen Ferguson, Director Product Support and Maintenance, Boeing Defence Australia said to ADM. “Our view is generally that the AIC elements are best done over the life of platform, because with a platform with a 30 or 40 year life, getting a little bit of work upfront for the produc- tion elements might look good initially but it dies off really quickly.
“Where if you get involved into the long- term sustainment, you’re there forever. And we’ve done that on pretty much every platform we’ve done. If you think about all the platforms that Boeing’s introduced into Australia in the last 10 years - P-8A, E-7 Wedgetail, Super Hornet, Growler, Chi- nook - all of those platforms have some lev- el of US government support, and they vary obviously, but our focus always is about getting Australian industry involved in the long term sustainment tail, because that’s where you get more volume versus should we get upfront.”
Boeing Defence Australia has also es- tablished the Boeing Rotorcraft Network through ICN that now has over 200 com- panies on the books to respond to AIC elements as they come to light. This en- compasses not their future work on hope- fully for them, the Apache, but also their award-winning sustainment work on Chi- nook and fixed wing platforms as well. The company also hopes to leverage this collec- tion of businesses into their wider Global Supply Chain efforts. ■
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