Eleven Bids for a Contract That Ends in 2052
The Army just handed its entire initial-entry helicopter training pipeline to one contractor for 26 years, bought through a commercial solutions opening with no certified cost or pricing data. Four contracts collapse into one, the two largest incumbencies expire eight days apart in January, and the next time this work is contestable, most of the people reading this will be retired.
The Army bought twenty-six years of helicopter flight school on Thursday.
One contract, one contractor, a $10,000,000,000 ceiling, and an estimated completion date of August 12, 2052.
M1 Support Services took W9124P-26-D-A004 on eleven offers, a firm-fixed-price IDIQ out of Army Contracting Command Redstone Arsenal covering initial entry rotary-wing training at Fort Rucker for 800 to 1,500 pilots a year.
Eleven bids is a genuinely deep field for a services requirement of any size.
It is also the last one anybody gets on this work for a generation.
"What does a capture pipeline look like when the next entry point is 2052?"
The Numbers on the Award Notice
The SAM award notice went up August 13 and the requirement reached the Pentagon board the following afternoon.
Set-aside: none. NAICS 611512, flight training. PSC U006, place of performance Fort Rucker.
The notice describes the buy in one sentence: initial entry rotary wing training services "using a Contractor Owned-Contractor Operated business model under the Flight School Next program."
That phrase is doing all of the work.
The rest of this brief is for subscribers.
The specific solicitations, dockets, and dates to act on sit past this line.
$50 a month, or $500 a year.
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