U.S. Army Gives Wyle Three Year, $3M Contract

Wyle has been awarded a $3 million, three-year contract to provide qualification testing for the U.S. Army UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, subsystems, and components. The testing will also apply to commercial variants of the Blackhawk used by the FBI, fire fighting agencies, and other organizations.

These tests are designed to improve the reliability of installed modifications to the UH-60 helicopter, reduce total ownership costs, and to decrease unplanned maintenance events.

The UH-60 program office has several modification programs with specific types of electronics and other systems that will be utilized, which are not present in the U.S. Army version of the helicopter.

Any new component that is considered for this helicopter must be tested to ensure compatibility and interoperability with existing equipment, and to ensure that the component can reliably perform in the environment that the UH-60 Helicopter will experience in the field.  

This assurance is gained by performing detailed and specific sets of testing per either established military standards or standards that have been tailored to reflect the unique profiles of the UH-60. 

Wyle will develop profiles for environmental, electromagnetic compliance, and power quality tests, generate specific test procedures, fabricate or modify test fixtures and monitoring devices to conduct rigorous tests which will be documented in test reports containing all data collected and reduced.  The work is being completed by Wyle's Test and Engineering East facility for the Utility Helicopter Program Office at Redstone Arsenal, both located in Huntsville, AL.

Among the many component tests that Wyle will conduct are the following: Altitude, high and low temperature, rain, fungus, salt fog, crash hazard shock, acceleration, vibration, highly-accelerated life testing, and numerous others.