Mission Effectiveness and Productivity Measures - A Value Proposition for Military Rotorcraft

Quantitatively projecting value in commercial rotorcraft development has been a focus for engineering disciplines for many years. Adapting a value proposition to future military vertical lift aircraft poses a challenge due to changing operating environments. The U.S. Army Engineering Design Handbook for rotorcraft broadly defines mission effectiveness as operational effectiveness divided by total ownership cost. In layman's terms, that translates to "bang for the buck." The simple logic of such a relationship should be self evident and an excellent basis for deriving a suitable measure of value. Understanding the dependencies between cost and weight, or availability and operational and support (O&S) cost, is a key to developing a useful measure of value for the military customer. The value in this approach is objectivity and increased awareness of how decisions or design features affect an aircraft in its operational environment over the entire product life cycle.