The Governmental Accountability Office denied a protest from protection contractors Sikorsky and Boeing over the Army’s determination final 12 months to award a profitable helicopter contract to rival Bell Textron, Inc. 

With Thursday’s determination from the GAO, the Army and Bell Textron can go forward with growing the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program below an preliminary contract price greater than $7 billion.

The Army picked Bell Textron’s submission, a V-280 Valor tiltrotor design, just like the V-22 Osprey flown by the Marine Corps, over the Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant. The shedding proposal featured a pair of rotor blades stacked on prime of one another.

The FLRAA program is supposed to provide a brand new mannequin of vertical-lift plane to reinforce and in the end exchange the Army’s fleet of growing old UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. When absolutely carried out, together with with international gross sales, this system could possibly be price as much as $70 billion, Army officers have mentioned.

After awarding the contract to the Fort Worth-based Bell Textron, the Army insisted it adopted a “deliberate and disciplined process” that ensured equitable remedy for each bidders. But Sikorsky challenged the choice, saying the proposals weren't “consistently evaluated” to ship the perfect worth to the Army.

“In denying the protest, GAO concluded that the Army reasonably evaluated Sikorsky’s proposal as technically unacceptable,” the congressional watchdog company mentioned in a press release. “GAO also denied Sikorsky’s various allegations about the acceptability of Bell’s proposal.”

The GAO doesn’t take a place on the deserves of the proposals from each corporations, saying that could be a matter left as much as the Army. They mentioned their position is solely to find out whether or not the service complied with procurement legal guidelines and laws through the bid course of.

In a joint assertion from Lockheed-Martin Sikorsky and Boeing, the businesses mentioned they continue to be assured that their submission was “the most capable, affordable and lowest-risk Future Long Range Assault Aircraft solution.”

“We will review the GAO’s decision and determine our next steps,” they mentioned.

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