?This is a world-class facility that provides a simulated flight environment allowing us to test these key subsystems individually and then integrated together to warrant out any issues prior to advancing to test flight,? said John Johnson, Program Manager for the CH-53K helicopter program. ?This will reduce the number of required flight test hours, resulting in significant time and cost savings to the customer.?

The integrated experience closely resembles the actual aircraft and will allow the pilot to fly simulated missions to evaluate qualitative performance such as pilot workload and warning annunciations, and have the actual ?look and feel? of the aircraft.

Mike Torok, Vice President and Chief Engineer for Sikorsky Marine Corps Systems, said: ?This new lab is the product of lessons learned from other major Sikorsky integrated lab programs. It enables new levels of integration testing across multiple aircraft systems to ensure functionality is proven before we ever get to the aircraft ? and that will yield a successful flight test program in the future.?

Sikorsky Aircraft received a $3 billion System Development and Demonstration (SDD) contract on April 5, 2006 to develop a replacement for the U.S. Marine Corps CH-53E heavy lift helicopter. The new aircraft program is planned to include production of more than 200 aircraft. Currently, the CH-53K helicopter is in the SDD phase with more than 99 percent of the major subcontracts awarded and valued at more than $1.1B.