This month’s Farnborough International Airshow (FIA) would normally have seen the remaining contenders for the UK’s New Medium Helicopter (NMH) requirement – Airbus Helicopters, Leonardo UK and Lockheed Martin UK/Sikorsky – strongly outlining the strength of their bids. In the event, however, there was little such activity following the coming to power in early July of a new Labour government that soon declared it would conduct a strategic defence review, which is due to report in 2025.
When the NMH programme was first announced by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in March 2021, the ministry announced that it would procure up to 44 aircraft in a contract worth GBP 0.9-1.2 billion (EUR 1-1.4 billion) that “intends to rationalise existing multiple rotary-wing requirements into one platform type, maximising commonality in order to improve efficiency and operational flexibility”.
The programme was intended to cover four distinct rotary-wing requirements. As well as replacing the fleet of 23 Royal Air Force (RAF) Puma HC2s operated by No 33 and No 230 squadrons out of RAF Benson in Oxfordshire from 2025, the programme was also intended to replace five Bell 212s serving with the Army Air Corps’ (AAC’s) No 667 Squadron in Brunei, three Griffin HAR2s operated by the RAF’s No 84 Squadron out of RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus (tasked with search and rescue), and six special-forces-roled AS365 N3 Dauphin IIs operated by the AAC’s No 658 Squadron from the Special Air Service (SAS) barracks at Credenhill in Herefordshire.
Beyond procuring aircraft, the NMH contract was also to “include the provision of training capabilities and a maintenance/spares package as well as design organisation scope”, according to the MoD. The relatively ambitious in-service date for the new helicopters was given as 2025, suggesting that an already-existing airframe was likely to be chosen.
Thus far, only Airbus Helicopters has secured a slice of the NMH pie, after the MoD published on 13 November 2023 a notification of intent to procure six Airbus Helicopters H145 aircraft, along with three years of support services, to serve British forces operating in Brunei and Cyprus. On 18 April 2024 the UK MoD’s Defence Equipment & Support organisation announced it had awarded Airbus a GBP 122 million (EUR 142.6 million) contract for the six H145s.
While Airbus is actually bidding the H175M – a military variant of the Airbus H175 civilian type – for NMH, selection of the H145 for the Brunei and Cyprus roles made sense from a logistical and training perspective, as three of the type are already operated under the UK armed forces’ contractor-operated Military Flying Training System regime, where the H145s are known as Jupiter HT1s.
The ordering of the H145s means that aviation support to UK defence facilities in Brunei and Cyprus, where Puma HC2s took over from the three Griffin HAR2s on 31 March 2023, has been extracted from the NMH requirement.
The NMH programme seemed to make progress on 27 February 2024 when the MoD issued an invitation to negotiate (ITN) for the requirement, with responses to the ITN due to be received by 30 August, but following the general election and announced strategic defence review, the NMH programme now seems to have all but fallen into abeyance.
Speaking to ESD at FIA 2024 on 23 July, an Airbus spokesman said of the NMH situation, “As far as I know, there’s no one way or the other as to whether it will continue or not. Meanwhile, we assume it will continue and we work towards putting our bid together.”
Meanwhile, Leonardo UK, which is bidding the AW149 for the NMH requirement, continues to push its credentials as the only downselected NMH contender that is currently manufacturing helicopters in the UK. In a general briefing at Farnborough on 22 July covering Leonardo’s current activities, Adam Clarke, managing director of the company’s helicopters business in the UK, said of Leonardo’s NMH bid, “We believe that we are in a strong position. For more than five years we’ve been laser focused on the delivery of this platform to the UK armed forces, ensuring it will be able to quickly go into service with the operator. Importantly, while we are confident in the platform and its capabilities, we’re equally competent in our economic value proposition to the UK.
“We will be providing UK built platforms with substantial design work conducted onshore, securing high quality jobs and skills and ensuring long-term social value for the UK taxpayer,” he added. “While competitors are offering some level of UK assembly, Leonardo is the only company downselected in the competition that actually has the skills and infrastructure onshore today.”
The third and final NMH contender, Lockheed Martin UK, has bid the UH-60M Black Hawk from its US parent company’s Sikorsky business. However, rumours prior to FIA 2024 suggested that, having recently secured plenty of firm UH-60M orders from elsewhere – eight from Croatia, 12 from Sweden and 12 from Austria in July alone – Lockheed Martin was growing weary of the long-drawn-out NMH programme. Asked about this at FIA 2024, Eric Schreiber, director of international sales for Sikorsky, told ESD, “We’re waiting for the Strategic Defence Review to come out, and we’re trying to be responsive. These procurements take a long time; some of the deals we’ve secured this year have been 10 years in the making.” He did not specifically deny that Lockheed Martin had withdrawn from the NMH contest.
As ESD talked to the three companies bidding for NMH at FIA 2024, it appeared to be clear that there was some sensitivity over the remaining numbers. When Leonardo’s Clarke was asked about how many aircraft are covered by the remaining NMH programme following the Brunei and Cyprus requirement being addressed by six Airbus H145s, for example, he replied that he is “not allowed to get into any details on the quantities within NMH”, adding that this was “one of the controlled requirements that I can’t talk about”.
Although the UK MoD originally stated in March 2021 that it would procure “up to 44 aircraft”, ESD understands that there was never a definite number of aircraft in the requirement and that it was up to the bidding companies to present solutions based on the available funding. It has been put to ESD that the budget of up to GBP 1.2 billion, which included VAT, was never enough to procure 44 aircraft, while the fact that modern helicopters are more reliable and cost-effective than legacy types would always have meant fewer airframes would be procured.
Further to this, ESD understands that the entire premise for the NMH requirement may well have been based on former defence secretary Ben Wallace, who was in post from July 2019 until August 2023, looking to avoid multiple UK rotary-wing replacement requirements all converging on the same timescale, rather than purely any dire need for new medium helicopters.
While the RAF’s Pumas have, indeed, been in service for more than 50 years, 24 of an original fleet of 53 aircraft underwent a mid-life upgrade, the contract for which was signed in September 2009, with the RAF returning this modernised fleet of Puma HC2s to operational service in 2015.
Published UK MoD data states that the RAF had a total of 18 Pumas in its inventory in 2023, of which 13 were in active service.
Sources from Airbus, which inherited the position of original equipment manufacturer of the Puma from Aerospatiale/Eurocopter, have suggested that the remaining Puma HC2s could be kept in service until the mid-2030s. If the NMH programme does ultimately become a casualty of the UK’s ongoing strategic defence review, then this ‘Plan B’ could effectively see Airbus Helicopters, in a way, secure another slice of the NMH pie, albeit only by maintaining helicopters already in service.
