Army and Air Force aircraft are not built to operate at sea. However,
the Defense Department believes that if non-Navy helicopter pilots
were trained to land on ships, it would help improve joint warfare.
That is the rationale behind a $22.5 million project that seeks
to enhance the compatibility of non-Navy helicopters with shipboard
systems.
There is much more to operating aircraft at sea than landing on
ships, said Navy Capt. James Thompson, in a recent interview. “It’s
not just the uniqueness of operating off a ship, but you’ve
got salt air, salt water, unpredictable winds, the pitch-and-roll
of the ship and certain constraints with regard to what the ship
has on board and can accommodate.”
Thompson is the program director of the Joint Shipboard Helicopter
Integration Process (JSHIP). His goal is to ease the difficulties
associated with non-Navy helicopter landings on ships.
The JSHIP program, chartered by the office of the secretary of
defense in 1998, is based at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River,
Md. It is currently in the third year of a five-year program.
“Our charter says we are to develop a process to safely integrate
Army and Air Force helicopters on board Navy ships,” said
Thompson. “Primarily, we are a joint program looking at the
other services’ helicopters and trying to understand compatibility,
procedures and training aspects, to determine what we need to combine
assets in a ‘no-kidding’ joint world.”
Richard Lockhart, the Defense Department’s deputy director
of developmental test and evaluation, said that JSHIP is in “a
unique position to solve and address the perplexing issues confronting
joint warfighters operating from the sea ... as it will set the
stage for how the services will operate jointly in the future.”
Training and Compatibility
JSHIP is a joint test and evaluation program, so it will be “short-lived,”
said Thompson. “Whatever products we leave in place, [the
Defense Department] will hand them off to the right organization
that is most suited for taking on all the things that we’ve
accomplished.”
There are three categories of shipboard operations that JSHIP must
evaluate: procedures, training and compatibility. “We go to
sea, with different classes of ships, with certain models of Air
Force, Army and Marine helicopters,” said Thompson. “We
operate in a fashion that helps us to understand and identify the
special ‘care and feeding,’ aspects of the different
helicopters.”
Thompson explained that Army and Air Force pilots currently are
not trained to land on ships. In a maritime environment, for example,
the ship crew wears different-colored shirts, and each color indicates
a particular function. That helps pilots figure out, where to land.
Army or Air Force pilot would not necessarily know what those colored-shirts
signify, Thompson said.
Aircraft specifications, such as the size of the helicopter, and
whether and how its propellers fold, are also important pieces of
information that the ship crew needs, in order to accommodate landings,
storage and overall support aboard.
Web Site
The JSHIP staff developed a web site (www.jship.jcs.mil), which
provides point-and-click information for Army and Air Force helicopter
pilots who need quick instructions on how to land on Navy ships.
Navy crews also can search the site for helicopter specifications.
Thompson pointed out that “the Navy and Marine Corps take
it for granted that we already have documentation in place that
deals with checklists, how to pack up correctly, to make sure we
have the right kind of equipment, how many people to bring and what
their skills should be,” he said. “The Army and Air
Force are sorely in need of this kind of information, as they may
have never even seen the kind of ship they’re landing on.”
Thompson noted that the JSHIP program does not ignore the role
of U.S. Marines in the aircraft-to-ship integration. “Marines
sometimes get concerned that we’re allowing other services
to play along on Navy ships and take them away from what they’re
there for, and that’s just not the case,” said Thompson.
“We’re learning what all the susceptibilities are and
we’re trying to find ways to work around them,” he said.
Army and Air Force helicopters, additionally, are not shielded
from electromagnetic emissions expelled by the ship. “Aircraft
that are not designed specifically for the sea, may have electronic
systems, automatic flight control systems, or weapons systems that
do not have the robustness built into them that shields them from
the densities of electromagnetic emissions that come off the ship,”
Thompson said.
JSHIP faces a host of procedural challenges, he explained, because
of a “lack of helicopter-to-ship certification testing,”
on the part of the services, each of which has different requirements.
A key concern for JSHIP is Navy rules about managing weapons and
ammunition, which must be loaded on its aircraft in a certain manner,
for safety reasons. “When an Army unit comes on board, they
may have different ways of doing it, so there are issues there that
have to be ironed out,” said John Padukiewicz, JSHIP’s
product manager.
Both the Army and the Air Force have ordnance in their inventories
that is not shipboard compatible, so they need to be made aware
of that, Thompson said. “If they’re not going to be
able to use what they have, once on board, maybe they can use Navy/Marine-type
ordnance, materiel that has already been approved for use on board.
We can work around these issues.”
Refueling on board also is a concern for many Army and Air Force
helicopters. “Typically, with a ship, it is best to pressure-refuel,
with a nozzle placed directly into the fueling system, and the fuel
comes out, very quickly, under pressure. This provides a tight seal,
so there is less fuel spillage, which can be a big hazard on a ship,”
said Thompson. “Most Army aircraft have gravity refueling
systems, just like a car, with the same amount of spillage.”
According to Padukiewicz, JSHIP is conducting a series of tests,
called Dedicated-At-Sea-Tests (DASTs). First, JSHIP must “establish
an existing capabilities baseline,” and then determine the
“necessary and potential improvements compared to the baseline.”
Appropriate changes must be designed and implemented, and finally,
the results must be tested for interoperability, he said.
Lockhart said that the JSHIP tests are going better than expected,
and that “scheduling and orchestrating DASTs is no small feat
given the complexities of testing the desired combinations of ship
classes and helicopter models.”
The DASTs have generated large volumes of data, according to the
fiscal year 2000 report of the office of the secretary of defense
director for operational test and evaluation. The report points
out some areas of concern, already identified by the JSHIP program,
such as physical compatibility between certain helicopter designs
and Navy ship landing decks.
Some problems that relate to certain models of Army and Air Force
helicopters’ wheel axles have been discovered. These posed
potential hazards for shipboard crews and for the landing helicopters.
A “general use naval aviation hazard report” has been
filed, so that these models of helicopters will be flagged and pilots
will be warned to not attempt to land on ships before modifications
are made.
“JSHIP is setting the example and establishing a reputation
of how the services can jointly team to ... more safely conduct
non-Navy/Marine Corps helicopter operations aboard Navy ships,”
said Lockhart.