Engineering, manufacturing & development phase

Under a request for proposals issued by the ACC in November for the next contract phase of the ITEP programme – the Engineering Manufacturing and Development (EMD) phase, for which the ACC will select just one engine, which will therefore become the de facto winner of the ITEP competition – ATEC and GE Aviation submitted in February their first-phase EMD proposals. According to Sousa, the ACC asked both companies to provide their EMD proposals in two phases.

The first phase, already submitted by GE Aviation and ATEC, covered basic contract requirements such as each company’s proposed schedule and cost for an EMD contract and the technical data which would be made available to the US Army throughout the contract phase, according to Sousa. The second phase, which GE Aviation calls the “technical volume” phase, will be a detailed proposal covering the design of the engine, how the contractor would perform and manage the integration of the ITEP engine into US Army helicopters and how the contractor would perform the test programme for the EMD contract.

Sousa said: “The [US] Army will have that information from us and our competitor all this summer and will spend several months evaluating it”. After evaluating the two competitors’ proposals, the SACC “will announce its decision by the end of the calendar year”.

US Army Contracting Command is headquartered at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama. Chris Kjelgaard