Crown takes on Herc work

It has been a bumpy ride to upgrade the Royal New Zealand Air Force fleet of heavy-lift Hercules aircraft, but it will soon be running more smoothly, the deputy secretary of defence says.

He was commenting after Defence Minister Wayne Mapp announced today that upgrade work on the C-130 Hercules would go ahead in Blenheim.

The deputy secretary of defence covering acquisitions, Des Ashton, said the Crown was a passive customer under the old agreement, but the change put it in charge of the outfitting contract.

The ministry was grateful for the positive way L-3 and Safe Air-Air New Zealand had worked through the difficult situation, he said.

Developing the prototype for the upgraded C-130 was the hardest part of the project and was almost completed, Mr Ashton said. Two C-130s are at the prototype stage, with all hardware fitted and waiting on only the integration software to make them functional.

One is in Texas and the other at Base Woodbourne. The plane at Woodbourne was the original prototype, returned to Woodbourne for routine maintenance by Safe Air.

The C-130 in Texas was expected to return to New Zealand fully upgraded and ready for operational testing by the end of the year, he said.

There would still be some snags in the project because of the complexity of the technology, but the outfit would be more straightforward than the delay-plagued prototype phase, Mr Ashton said.

"We expect there will be challenges – there always are. That's our job: to work around them, but it's a matter of having the right people, with the right information, with the right motivation, which we are hoping to put to use."

Outfit work on the first of the three remaining Hercules was expected to begin in the first quarter of next year, he said.

The work to replace structural components, avionics and navigation systems will take about a year for each aircraft.

Dr Mapp said the ministry estimated 330,000 hours of work for the three aircraft. Safe Air had first estimated 250,000 hours.

"It's a massively large project. They simply underestimated the scale of that work."

The Government would have lost up to $9.8 million through problems with the original contract, but the real figure would not be known until January 2012, he said.

The original contract was one of many poorly constructed Ministry of Defence deals made by the previous Labour-led government, he said. "The contract was too loose in scope and things were left to drift when problems were emerging ... there didn't seem a good enough process of getting on top of them [problems]."

- The Marlborough Express

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