National Defence committee  It's the challenge function, led by General Ward and his people.

National Defence committee  I need to correct you, because the MHP project was the one cancelled by the government. The aircraft you're referring to is the rotary ring search and rescue, which is a completely different project.

National Defence committee  Yes, exactly. The S-92, which is being built by Sikorsky for our maritime patrol aircraft, was a commercial aircraft, and we've only modified the tail, and so on. So we have a fairly high degree of confidence that it was a proven aircraft. I think it's difficult to say that the government had any real significant role in the difficulty we've had with the Cormorant.

National Defence committee  We will work that out with the United States Air Force.

National Defence committee  That type of servicing is the periodic inspection type of service that would go on, say, once every six months, and so on. You can schedule that with the Boeing global support system, and it can be done in Australia, Germany, the United States--anywhere they have one of those facilities.

National Defence committee  We didn't actually have the agreement until after the project.

National Defence committee  Public Works is the contracting authority. My understanding is that all our contracts have termination terms and conditions in them--the language is “termination for convenience”--so you can always terminate a contract. There are costs for terminating a contract; they are largely for compensating the company for any expenses or work we have asked them to do.

National Defence committee  At this point, they wouldn't be major; if you go another year from now, they would be fairly significant.

National Defence committee  It would probably be hundreds of millions of dollars.

National Defence committee  The crews are being trained now. The crew is very small. It's a crew of only four people. I had a conversation with the commander of 1 Canadian Air Division fairly recently, and they will be ready to fly their plane in the summer. That will effectively be the initial operating capability.

National Defence committee  Good. I'd like a question about that, actually.

National Defence committee  I've been involved in this business since 1982. When I first came to National Defence Headquarters as a major, I was the manager of the army's equipment program. My view would be that over the past 25 years we have had some internal self-inflicted wounds, as I mentioned, but there has often been uncertainty by governments about how much they wanted to fund in national defence, and uncertainty in the department about whether it was affordable or whether we would get policy approval.

National Defence committee  C'est possible. In this case, the process would have been the same. We would have gone out to industry, as we did, and invited anyone who had a solution, and we had proposals from Boeing, we had proposals from Russian transport companies. We confirmed that we only had one that was a certified aircraft in production and we went to them to negotiate a contract.

National Defence committee  No.

National Defence committee  No, not in that case.