By Dan Parsons
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation, or NA-80, recently embarked the second and final phase of a refresh for its Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) air fleet: airplanes and helicopters the agency uses to gather data about nuclear accidents, incidents and potential radiological terror attacks.
This week, the Exchange Monitor spoke with Jay Tilden, NNSA’s associate administrator for counterterrorism and counterproliferation since 2016, about how his relatively small office went about the fleet refresh.
NNSA is buying two Leonardo Helicopters AW139s to replace its existing Bell 412 helicopters. The tab was about $35 million. In the first round of the NEST refresh in 2019, the agency swapped out three 1980s-vintage airplanes for new Textron Aviation King Air 350ERs, which cost about $32 million. The aircraft are equipped with specialized sensors that sample ambient air for signs of unnatural or anomalous radiation levels over incident scenes or prior to high-profile public events like presidential inaugurations or the Super Bowl.
Exchange Monitor: Can you run through the effort to refresh the fleet, both the fixed-wing and rotorcraft?
Tilden: We have two of the planes assigned to Andrews [Air Force Base in Maryland], one rotary assigned to Andrews and then we have one plane out at Nellis [Air Force Base] in Nevada with one rotary and that gives an East Coast/West Coast presence and with the planes you now have distance to actually cover most of the country and you can get there quick.
The nuclear emergency support team, NEST, has a pretty broad set of missions. It starts off with counter-WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and crisis response. It also has an accident response group to respond to an accident with U.S. nuclear weapons, and then it also has a public health and safety mission. The things that are kind of sexier — a loose nuke — even in those scenarios, you need to have your sense about what the public health and safety impacts could be.
That’s why we spend a lot of time on modeling and simulation, but when it comes to public health and safety and consequence management there is no replacement for real data.
That is what AMS can provide us, this idea that if we have something happen, if there is an accident or an incident and we have a release of radiological material, well before the radiological assistance program teams around the country can get there, we can actually quickly deploy the fixed wing aircraft.
This is why we have three King Airs 350s. [The previous airplanes] were getting to be in their mid-30s, about 35 plus years old, and they were not purpose-built. They were procured and then they were retrofitted. I got to fly in all of these earlier aircraft and you could tell that the ergonomics weren’t that good.
What specific capabilities was NEST and NA-80 looking for in its new aircraft?
The idea on the plane is you put a small, advanced team as well as your scientist/technician who’s going to be utilizing the radiation-sensing equipment and you would quickly get them out to the problem.
While the aircraft are not as good as the helicopter, they can get there quick[er] and they can start doing their grid survey. You do that while you’re waiting on the helicopter to get there. So that’s why we prioritized getting rid of the airplanes first. We had maintenance issues. [and] we figured it’s time to buy purpose-built and that’s what we did. [Otherwise] we were going to have to upgrade with the modern avionics and that would have been costly.
[Also,] we wanted to make sure these things don’t look like they’re military. We don’t need to be flying the black helicopters of the world UN government over cities. So that’s why we have a very distinctive kind of a schema for the color. That way it’s very clear this is not a military type aircraft. We’ve debated about whether or not we want to add thermal and or photography, but we want to stay very narrow.
[For the helicopters,] we’re adding two additional detectors for a total of six, which means better measurements. Because of the speed and [range] it can reach the middle of the country within one day, instead of a day and a half. During an emergency event, you want to get there as soon as you can. So, the max speed is higher. It can [also] lift more; the load goes from about 3,900 to 4,700 pounds. It can seat 17, but we’re not going to do a total of 17 seats because we’re going to have equipment in there. But if we needed to get some people on there to go forward to meet up with the RAP [Radiological Assistance Program] teams, we have that capability. [And] it’s an all-weather helicopter.
Are your old Bell 412s also reaching the end of their service lives?
The helicopters are about almost 30 years old on average. The Bell platform is a solid platform and these things don’t have that much wear and tear but, still, aging is aging.
The big thing we decided we wanted to do differently was to get the sensors inside and also to increase the amount of equipment we could actually have inside, to increase the amount of sensors that we had.
[R]ight now with the Bell, you have to have the fuel tank under the deck plate. That prevents us from putting the sensors inside. So the sensors have to be outside and when they’re out you lose some efficiencies. There are some minor things like with the sun shining on one side, or if it’s cold on the other side you have to adjust for the two sensors.
The helicopters are the low and slow so we wanted to make sure it was a well-proven platform, you know, multiple-engine because when you’re low and slow over a city, the last thing you need is a single-engine failure and when you have twin engines you really have a much more robust kind of an approach.
Was there any pushback on choosing the Leonardo AW139 to replace incumbent Bell, as the Air Force also did with its UH-1N fleet?
We got some internal guff about whether it is American made. But it’s built in Philadelphia and well used inside government channels. The Maryland state police helicopters are also an Augusta Westland [now Leonardo Helicopters], so we think it’s a good choice and it is leading to American jobs.
Did your office handle the procurement? And did you have any issues with getting the funding for the recapitalization effort? How does this program stack up against your office’s typical procurement budget?
My office is not even that big in the scheme of things. It’s so funny in the federal government when you tell someone “I don’t run a really big office, it’s only $350 million or so.” We had been getting some squawks from the departmental aviation office. On one hand, they’re saying “you have one of the best fleets.” I think [it received] the [General Services Administration] small aircraft fleet award several times over the last 10 years. On the other hand, the Aviation Safety Office is like, man, your stuff’s getting old. The Hill completely bought in. They support the mission. We got the money we executed on the planes and carried over about $35 million for the helicopters.
What mission or capability requirements did the AoA highlight? Did it show a continued need for a small mixed fleet of airplanes and helicopters?
Honestly, 20 years from now, maybe 15 years from now, we may not need aircraft. The drone world and the regulatory environment may be such that we can replace these with a series of drone stations that are with our radiological assistance program across the country. But the largest thing that prevented us from going down that road right now was the regulatory environment. Even if the technology was there, the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] is still just cranking through “what does it mean to fly a drone in the U.S.?”
The idea of getting gear and people on scene quickly and then the regulatory environment led us to confirm that, in fact, we do need manned: fixed and rotary. Once that was done, it went over to acquisition program management and they kind of ran with that. We were very quick with the fixed wings because the fixed wing requirements very quickly led you to the King Air 350ER because there really is no other competition. We did not have a problem getting the money and, again, it’s big money to us. It’s not big money to the department.
We had to explain that our carryovers are going to be high, because the helicopter field is much more competitive. There were a fair amount of bidders and there were a fair amount of viable alternatives there. We just let the APM process go through all the bids. It took longer than I would have liked. But that being said, we are now at the end and we’ve awarded it. There are no bumps ahead and we have the money.
Can you say how many biters there were?
I don’t know if I can or not, but it certainly was not sole source.
The request for proposals for the Bell 412 replacement said they fly about 250 hours a year. Outside of a major nuclear incident or accident, what is their operational tempo?
The 250 is an estimate. It could be higher or lower. One of the things that I think is kind of unique about us, is that to this day all of our pilots are dual platform, so they’re both able to do the fixed and the rotor. Probably the largest tranche of what they do is proficiency flights. The next tranche down would be preventive radiological nuclear detection: Anytime there’s a high visibility event that occurs in the country, either the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI or the Secret Service, any of them can declare that they are going to treat this as a high priority security event.
With the helicopter, we would work with whoever the lead is, and either just before or during the security bubble being set up around that event venue we would do the low-and-slow and make sure that there’s nothing there that shouldn’t be there. A radiological kind of a device is going to set off a signal and that’s what these things are designed to detect are signals either from deposition on the ground — which, knock on wood we haven’t had and hopefully we won’t have — or some sort of a device.
Jay, thank you for your time, this has been a fascinating conversation. Good luck with fielding your new fleet.
I appreciate the opportunity to talk about our AMS recapitalization.
