Personal protective equipment specialist Avon Protection has been awarded three contracts by the US Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Advanced System for Protection and Integrated Reduction of Encumbrances Hood/Mask Interface (ASPIRE HMI) programme, which is executed by the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND).
The three contracts, announced on 11 November 2024, will cover the design and development of a solution to optimise integration between currently fielded M50 and M53A1 CBRN protective masks and CBRN protective garment hoods on a CBRN suit.
The value of the contracts was not disclosed.
“The risk a customer faces when procuring protective equipment as individual systems from different suppliers is that there are potential integration issues at the points at which these different systems meet, no matter how advanced each individual system is,” Steve Elwell, president of Avon Protection, was quoted as saying in a company press release. “Our approach is to mitigate this risk by designing our equipment to integrate seamlessly together, and it is this understanding of the importance of interface optimisation between systems that we will bring to our work on this contract.”
The US DoD is a strategic partner for Avon Protection, with millions of Avon Protection M50/M51 and M53/M53A1 air purifying respirators (APRs) in use across all branches of the US military.
