Brewster: Canada puts $800M Griffon helicopter upgrade on hold over technical 'complexity'

Noah Note

​Well, we have a rare Saturday story that captured my attention. Usually, the weekends are fairly quiet to allow me to catch up, but it seems that this time we get to make a slight detour today to talk about our little friends, the Griffon.

​Papa Brewster today put on blast that the Griffon Limited Life Extension was on hold, and was being scaled back. We reported similar last year, though I was far more casual about it. I won't spend all day talking about GLLE here, so we'll keep it short. I also have a busy day today, being the first day of summer vacation. Also, I feel talking about the Griffons is overly depressing for the weekend, but I will jump in a little bit to provide some context here.

​The Griffon Limited Life Extension was already in bad shape, and always has been. Integrating the new Glass Cockpit and Flight Management System has been a nightmare, and Bell has struggled to get it done. The new Mission Management System apparently had really bad issues during integration on the software side, and trying to onboard both the new commercial systems taken from the EPX and systems like the MX-15 was a challenge.

​The teardown was far more difficult than first expected; the nose had to be redesigned, as many of you know, to accommodate. The final product was heavier than first anticipated, and if you know the Griffon, you know there ain't many margins there. We skipped on a few things people were upset about, like the mast and adding Link 16, but at the end of the day, those are what they are considering timelines and scope.

​It has been a mess… I will say that, and despite the best efforts of many people that Bell has brought in, things just weren't really working out. Trying to take the thirty-year-old, already limited Griffon, tear almost everything out of them, and then rebuild them with modern architecture just didn't work as well as some hoped.

​More importantly to this conversation is that nTACS got moved up significantly in timelines. Phase I, which we talk about here, has an IOC date right now of around 2028. For a proper Griffon replacement, Phase III for the new Medium-Lift is looking at an IOC around 2032, so just about six years.

​At those timelines, spending billions on upgrading and sustaining the Griffon fleet makes little sense. There are few reasons to continue with a struggling, limited, billion-dollar upgrade to an obsolete fleet whose replacement will be delivered in the next five years.

​There is a strong desire with nTACS moving to the DIA to get it done. In certain scenarios, which sadly I can't talk about, those timelines are actually fairly firm because we'll need deliveries before the 2032 period. I can't talk on those plans, but there is more out there for nTACS, and its scope is not against being expanded.

​We have to make choices somewhere. That includes needing to take the loss here and moving on to getting nTACS done and dusted. The quicker we do that, the better. CANSOF and 427 will get their own platform in the interim to fully move away from, starting in the next year or two, if all goes to plan and nTACS gets moving.

​We'll have a new Attack Helicopter falling into place around 2030/2031, followed by a new Medium-Lift Helicopter in that 2032 timeline. One following the other, and so forth. Until then, we still have the Chinooks, which are also looking at an expansion. There are still talks about going beyond 16 aircraft for the Cormorant fleet.

​There are interim solutions, and there are ways to mitigate that are on the table. In some cases, we accept and look to making sure nTACS is successful over keeping things going, hoping that they end up working out. We have had a lot of that this year; LRSS is another example of similar, where we just have to accept and move on.

Failures are bound to happen, and plans have undoubtedly changed a lot the last two years. There is nothing the same. There are no timelines, no projects, nothing that has not been affected in the last year. It is wonderful to see, a spectacle to some. As an outsider, it is almost a miracle in some regards.

What was the plan two years ago might be fundementally gone and dusted. Part of why I feel we need a new Defence Policy a lot sooner, because I don't think anyone will stand and defenxe that ONSF isn't already outdated in the current enviornment.

Either way, would be a somber and whimpering end to the story of ghe Griffon if this is where we call it a show for the most part. Maybe then some of you can forgive Marcel Masse. Given some of you still yell about Unification, I doubt it!