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Military wants contractor help to improve cargo drops

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By John Nolan, Staff Writer Updated 11:45 AM Wednesday, February 1, 2012

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE — The Air Force and the Army are asking industry to propose methods to ensure more precise drops of armaments, equipment, medicine and other cargoes from military planes.

Business suggestions that could provide immediate benefit to troops, particularly in mountainous Afghanistan, will be relayed to battlefield commanders as soon as practical, said John Doepker, manager of the precision airdrop program in the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A key goal is ensuring that drops are done as close as possible to the recipients.

Concepts that could require longer-term research and development could become requests for proposals to contractors months from now through the Federal Business Opportunities (www.fedbizopps.gov) website, Doepker said.

“It’s cargo going out the back end of a cargo plane, and how the wind would affect its drop,” he said. “They want to make the drops more precise.

“We’re in what we call the market research phase, asking companies what the ‘art of the possible’ is,” Doepker said.

Representatives of industry met Tuesday at Hope Hotel, on Wright-Patterson, with officials from the base and the Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., along with representatives from the Army’s Natick (Mass.) Research Development and Engineering Center.

The focus is on military deliveries, but it could also benefit air drops of humanitarian cargoes.

Efforts to be more precise in where and how military cargoes are dropped could include better measurements of wind, improved tracking of which bundles fell where and better coordination of drops in relation to when pilots order them, Doepker said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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