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With the Trump Administration's emphasis on reducing the size of the federal government, the Department of the Army plans to cut thousands of civil servant positions (compared to the beginning of the year), as well as streamlining and improving efficiency. The Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM)'s Aviation & Missiles Center (AvMC) must eliminate 700 positions.
For instance AvMC's Technology Development Directorate (TDD) has had to allocate cuts across its personnel. In addition, TDD is changing the job location for its Design, Simulation and Experimentation (DSE) employees from Moffett Field, California (based at NASA Ames Research Center) to Huntsville, Alabama (based at Redstone Arsenal). The DSE team are among the top scientists and researchers for Army Aviation in the areas of design, experimentation, computational fluid dynamics, aeromechanics and flight controls.
Many of the 60 affected federal employees have elected to retire or separate voluntarily, while few if any of the remainder will likely transfer to Redstone. Each individual has to make the best choice for themselves and their families, and uprooting their lives to move across the country is situation that anyone would avoid if possible.
Redstone Arsenal is the home to AvMC and 70 other tenant agencies, with thousands of Army engineers and program managers working across the Army. It's the headquarters for TDD, and having the DSE science and technology (S&T) leaders from Ames Research Center co-located with other thousands of other AvMC and Army engineers and project offices (e.g., for the AH-64 Apache, UH-60 Black Hawk, CH-47 Chinook and MV-75 Valor helicopter programs), would have numerous synergies.
However, the specific functions of DSE -- design, simulation and experimentation in support of helicopters, advanced rotorcraft, drones and other vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft -- would be significantly impaired.
Army Expertise Impacted
The Army established an office at Moffett Field, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, in 1965 to form a collaborative relationship with NASA to conduct rotorcraft research and development (R&D). Ames was chosen because of NASA's established vertical flight research facilities -- including the world's largest wind tunnel -- and the existing expertise base of NASA engineers familiar with rotorcraft R&D challenges. Research collaboration between the Army, NASA and the Air Force has continued through today, 60 years later.
Rotorcraft historically have a strong dual-use technology aspect. Various forms of the Black Hawk helicopters are flown by the military and in law-enforcement and civilian-firefighting roles. Current Bell civilian helicopters share high commonality with those previously operated by the Army and currently flown by numerous government agencies. The NASA/Army XV-15 tiltrotor demonstrator was developed at Ames and led to the V-22 Osprey (flown by the US Marines, Navy, Air Force and Japan Ground Self-Defense Force) the Bell/Leonardo AW609 civil tiltrotor, and the Bell MV-75 now under development. The Army's Boeing H-47 and H-6 helicopters are also flown by civilian operators.
Over the years, Army/NASA collaboration was essential to numerous rotorcraft R&D programs for national security applications, including:
Often, interest in vertical flight and rotorcraft research has peaked at different times within NASA and the DoD, so collaboration has helped to maintain a strong technical base for more than a half-century. For instance, in 2014 NASA initiated studies into electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft concepts; this was seven years in advance of the Air Force's Agility Prime initiative or later Army interest in these concepts. Three of the world's leading eVTOL companies (Archer Aviation, Joby Aviation and Wisk Aero) are developing their eVTOL aircraft in Silicon Valley.
The Army/NASA collaboration at Ames has also helped to create a nexus of rotorcraft technology expertise in the San Francisco Bay Area, with dozens of small businesses who have developed advanced vertical flight technologies for military and civilian rotorcraft, drones and eVTOL aircraft. In fact, many of the technical experts working on eVTOL in the Bay Area either previously worked at or interned in the NASA or Army rotorcraft R&D groups at Moffett Field.
The loss of access to the NASA expertise and facilities at Ames will impair the Army's VTOL research. To use these unique facilities to advance military rotorcraft, Army scientists will have to work remotely and travel the 2,000 miles frequently for on-site planning, testing and usage. It significantly complicates the ability to execute joint research projects in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex (NFAC) wind tunnels and the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) -- both national resources -- that have typically occurred several times a year; this will eliminating the ability for the workforce to be physically co-located on a daily basis. It also eliminates the routine technical interchange between Army and NASA employes at technical talks, lunchtime conversations and other events, where cross-pollination and creative sparks typically occur.
The transfer also erodes Army employees' ability to participate in and stay aware of developments in the commercial eVTOL and small drone activities; NASA currently is actively participating in these developments at Ames and a significant industrial base exists in the Bay Area.
Irrecoverable Expertise
The planned transfer of function for DSE moves Army employees from within an organization with a focus on the highly specialized technical subject of civil and military rotorcraft S&T at Ames into a large development enterprise within AvMC, where the majority of employees and funding is focused on missile development.
Because each individual must make a personal decision, there is a high likelihood that the majority of the Army's top experts in design, simulation, experimentation and flight controls will be lost. This loss may take a generation to recover, if ever. Hiring and training new scientists in Huntsville will help, but it takes a long time to regain decades of experience, and the proximity to the NASA facilities and experts is irreplaceable.
This is a critical transition period for military VTOL aircraft, as the DoD enacts its vision of transformational capabilities (more drones) and the Army accelerates the development of its first advanced rotorcraft, the Bell MV-75 Valor tiltrotor, the first all-digital aircraft for the Army, with unprecedented speed and range.