U.S Army Picks Wyle To Provide Qualification Testing On Blackhawk Helicopters

Wyle has won a $3 million 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. 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. 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. 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.