Implementation of New Aircraft Battery Technology in the Army 2002-01-3217

At a time where we are evolving toward the Objective Force and our planning processes are going through a transformation, the high maintenance of the vented nickel cadmium aircraft batteries has become a burden on the maintainers and aircraft users. Moving toward low maintenance or “maintenance free” battery types greatly reduces this burden, decreases the battery Operation and Support costs and promotes standardization. This change has to be done in such a way that it is both transparent as possible to the user and economically feasible to the program. In addition to replace our present family of vented aircraft nickel cadmium batteries with “maintenance free” types, it is also our goal to move from the present eight batteries (Figure 1) that support our helicopters to three standard batteries.