Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Harris.
The government of the day asked the bidders to commit to 48 months, which obviously was a very aggressive delivery schedule. The risk associated with that schedule at the time—and I was obviously not there at the time—was felt to be mitigated by taking a proven helicopter that was performing well in maritime missions in offshore oil rigs and adding proven mission equipment to it, which of course had to be integrated.
I think the difficulty that we've encountered—and to be fair, Sikorsky has done very good work on this—is the challenge of certification and testing. It wasn't the folding of the tail and rotor and the implementation of a mission system; it is the technical airworthiness certification that must be completed before it's safe to be flown by our crews and perform the missions.
We're at year six of a process that normally takes, as I said, between seven and 12 years. We will take our fully mission-ready helicopter at year eight. The schedule is challenging in these programs. They're complex, they're difficult, and the company cannot guarantee weather conditions, testing conditions, etc., which will affect their certification program.