NASA Headquarters, Mission to Planet Earth Office, Washington, DC 20546 Attn:YF/Kevin Niewoehner

R -- RESEARCH AIRCRAFT CONSOLICATION REQUEST FOR INFORMATION POC Kevin Niewoehner tel: 202/358-0751/Gary Gaulkler, phone 202/358-1013 THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION. NASA Headquarters' Office of Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE) is reviewing its airborne research program, including the aircraft mission and operations, payload integration, and payload maintenance and operations of NASA's aircraft used for Earth System science research applications. Specifically, NASA MTPE plans to consolidate aircraft now located at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) and NASA Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC), and requests industry input regarding feasibility, approaches and innovative operating ideas that could reduce the cost of operating our aircraft and instruments. NASA PLANS TO DEVELOP A COMPETITIVE REQUIREMENT FROM APPROACHEES PRESENTED; THEREFORE PROPRIETARY BUSINESS INFORMATION SHOULD NOT BE INCLUDED IN YOUR RESPONSES. NASA will be developing a baseline with DFRC that consolidates existing multi-contract operations into consolidated contracts. The consolidated contracts shall include Aircraft Maintenance and Operations; Payload Integration; and Payload/Sensor Maintenance and Operations. NASA's objectives are, in priority order: to support science objectives; to reduce the NASA cost of operating aircraft and instruments; and to support commercial development of remote sensing. NASA believes that signficant commercial markets may exist for hyper spectral, radar, and thermal imagery. NASA's MTPE requests industry input regarding how best to accomplish its airborne missions to fully configure, maintain, and operate its current aircraft fleet or the contractor's equivalent. These aircraft will be based at DFRC (baseline plan), and will deploy world wide to conduct scientific missions, primarily used to provide the scientific community a global in situ and remote sensing capability in support of MTPE atmospheric and earth surface observations for NASA's Earth Observing System. The aircraft fleet to be consolidated at DFRC consists of NASA-415 (UH-1-H); NASA-425 (T-39-E); NASA-426 (P-3-B); NASA-427 (C-130-Q); NASA-706 (ER-2); NASA-708 (ER-2); NASA-709 (ER-2); and NASA-717 (DC-8-72). Historical aircraft usage has been: between 100-700 yearly flight hours; flight durations typically lasting 6-8 hours (between 1-3 hours for the T-39E and the UH-1H aircraft); and deployed between 3-6 months per year (between 1-2 months per year for the T-39E and the UH-1H aircraft). This RFI requests that industry provide an overview (possible approaches, business plan overview, rough-order-of-magnitude cost) for both (a) consolidated aircraft operations and maintenance, payload integration and test, and payload/sensor maintenance and operations and (b) most cost effective scenarios to address MTPE's airborne scientific research requirements. Considerations may include use of contractor's or other aircraft, ''franchizing'' the airplanes to other government agencies, privatization, commercialization, etc. NASA is not looking for proposals; rather we are gathering information on the feasibility of consolidating MTPE airborne research operations, innovative approaches to accomplish this, and industry interest in performing this work. PLEASE NOTE -- NASA intends to develop information received into a competitive requirement to be issued out of NASA's DFRC. Proprietary business information should NOT be included. For additional information, contract Kevin Niewoehner (202/258-0751) or Gary Gaulkler (202/358-1013). Please send one copy of your response to each of the following: (1) Kevin Niewoehner, NASA Headquarters, Code YF, Washington, DC 20546 and (2) Russ Davis, NASA DFRC, Code XAA, Edwards, CA 93523. Please send responses by September 15, 1995. (0240)

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