Army looks to Rockwell Collins to provide critical spare parts for avionics instruments

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md., 28 April 2013. The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Land and Maritime segment at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., will award a three-year contract to Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to provide spare parts for U.S. Army tactical aircraft navigation avionics systems.

The contract calls for Rockwell Collins to provide spares for eight different subsystems on several avionics systems on the Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and other aircraft.

The spares from Rockwell Collins are for the AN/ARN-147 VHF Omnirange (VOR) instrument landing system and glideslope marker beacon radio receiver avionics; the AN/ARN-149 low-frequency automatic direction finder; and the AN/ARN-153 advanced digital tactical airborne navigation system.

The ARN-147 receives signals from VOR ground navigation beacons and provides outputs for aircraft navigation. The ARN-149 provides relative bearing to the station signal to an associated radio magnetic indicator and an aural output of the receive signal. The ARN-153 provides slant range distance, relative bearing velocity, time to station, and audio identification to instruments on the aircraft.

All these systems provide accurate altitude and distance functions to Army aircraft by means of RF signals. These eight spare parts from Rockwell Collins are line-replaceable units (LRUs) for these systems, Army officials say.

The Army considers these parts to be critical application items (CAI), which re essential to weapons performance, operation, the preservation of life, or safety of operating personnel, Army officials say.

The parts Rockwell Collins will provide to the Army are:

-- receiver 5826-01-444-0314, which provides unique analog deviation outputs for use in Black Hawk helicopters, and contains a MIL-sTD-1553B avionics databus interface;

-- control 5826-01-444-0317, which provides serial tuning and control inputs to the AN/ARN-147, which also has 5-volt lighting that is compatible with night-vision goggles;

-- control 5826-01-341-5089, which provides serial tuning and control inputs to the AN/ARN-149, with lighting compatible with nigh-vision goggles;

-- unique control 5826-01-395-5325, which provides serial tuning and control inputs to the ARN-149;

-- black antenna 5985-01-446-2574, which provides black low-frequency automatic direction finder combined sense and loop antenna capability;

-- radio receiver 5826-01-241-7489, which provides receiver with analog instrumentation only;

-- radio receiver 5826-01-600-6180, which provides low-frequency ADF receiver with analog instrumentation outputs; and

-- receiver-transmitter 386-01-386-8807, which provides digital tactical air navigation receiver-transmitter capability with digital-to-analog adapter and MIL-STD 1553B interface.

The contract is going to Rockwell Collins sole-source, because the company is the only known manufacturer of the avionics parts needed, Army officials say.

For more information contact Rockwell Collins online at www.rockwellcollins.com, or the DLA Land and Maritime at Aberdeen at www.landandmaritime.dla.mil/offices/DLAAberdeen.