Mr. Chair, earlier this spring we negotiated a purchase from the U.S. Navy of the entire remaining material from the VH-71 program, which included several hundred thousand spare parts, the majority of which are common to our version of the EH-101 Cormorant. There were nine aircraft in various states of completion that were in an excellent state of preservation. We inspected them. We purchased that package of spare parts with the primary objective of increasing our stock of individual spares and of major assemblies like transmissions and so on that we could feed into our repair and overhaul supply chain.
One of the key limitations to maintaining our Cormorants as serviceable is the length of time that a major assembly is away in the supply chain, and we had too few of those to feed the system.
We paid pennies on the dollar for those spare parts, and they are already having an effect on increasing the availability of our Cormorants.