The U.S. Army has hired a private contractor to fly an old Boeing 777 airliner from Saudi Arabia to the United States just so it can blow it apart. It may sound like a piece of the conspiracy at the center of a Hollywood spy thriller, but it’s actually part of an arrangement to help the Department of Homeland Security see how the plane might respond to a terrorist’s bomb or some other explosive incident.
On May 31, 2018, the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland announced that it had finalized the contract, worth nearly $1.5 million, with Clear Sky Aviation, LLC of Tucson, Arizona via the U.S. government's main contracting website, FedBizOpps. Under the terms of the deal, the company will fly the Ex-Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 777-268ER jet, which has tail number HZ-AKF, from that country’s capital Riyadh to Phillips Airfield at Aberdeen. The firm is also supplying four cargo sections from scrapped Boeing 747 jumbo jet airliners for additional destructive testing.
The “Aberdeen Test Center (ATC) is required to acquire and conduct commercial aircraft vulnerability testing in accordance with their interagency agreement … with [the] U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS),” an earlier contracting document explained. “ATC intends to use the aircraft solely for destructive testing purposes and agrees that it will not allow the aircraft, nor any of its component parts, to be used on any other aircraft by any party.”
HZ-AKF looks to have been a good candidate for the Army’s needs. It rolled off Boeing’s production line in 1998 and has flown almost 34,800 flight hours already. The jet has been sitting in storage in Riyadh since August 2017.
The video below shows HZ-AKF landing in Geneva, Switzerland in June 2017, just months before Saudi Arabian Airlines pulled it out of service.
In their quote, Clear Sky Aviation noted they were in the process of acquiring other 777s that might have had even higher flight hours and that it could substitute one of those for HZ-AKF if the Army was amendable. We don’t know whether or not ATC chose to accept an alternative airframe.
The original requirements called for a 777 of any subseries in a passenger configuration that ATC could pressurize to a representative level on the ground during the tests. The original request for proposals makes clear that airworthiness was not their primary concern.
For example, the aircraft only had to have “the complete landing gear assemblies or suitable replacement which could consist of time-expired landing gear components or fabricated steel components that would be able to safely support the aircraft and not hinder the aircraft from being repositioned to a specific location on a test pad as needed,” according to the initial contracting notice. “Timber shoring or cradles will not be an acceptable means of support.”
After getting HZ-AKF to Maryland, Clear Sky Aviation has a month to rip out anything it hasn’t agreed to sell to the Army and might want to keep for itself. The company says it will retain the aircraft’s two engines, the auxiliary power units, and other components.
Here’s a full breakdown of what the company offered the Army:
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