Early tomorrow I board an airplane to Columbus, Mississippi. A proud community, Columbus boasts the birthplace of playwright Tennessee Williams and the world's largest toilet seat factory. It also happens to be the manufacturing home of the UH-72 Lakota, a beachhead for EADS' North American expansion. I'm going down south because EADS has invited journalists to attend a ceremony tomorrow morning marking the 100th UH-72 Lakota delivery to the US Army. (It doesn't hurt that EADS North America CEO Sean O'Keefe will also be there, and my colleagues and I have a few questions to ask him about a certain tanker competition.)
But I also want to know something about the UH-72 program. Few helicopter contracts awarded over the last decade have been so successful. EADS has delivered all 100 UH-72s on time and on budget, which is so unusual that it's almost newsworthy. Alas, the achievement comes with an asterisk. The UH-72 remains the only non-training helicopter in the Army's inventory that can't be deployed into a combat zone.
In an attempt to save money and speed up a replacement for the UH-1 Huey, the army didn't ask for a militarized helicopter.
More than two years ago, an EADS executive told me it's only a matter of time before the army reconsiders the militarization requirement. In the meantime, EADS has teamed up with Lockheed Martin to adapt the UH-72's civilian airframe -- the EC145 -- into the armed and militarized AS645 scout helicopter.
Few armies have the luxury to operate a fleet of hundreds of non-combat-ready helicopters. It remains to be seen whether the US Army will stay as the outlier -- or will finally militarize the Huey's successor.
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