HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. -- Officials here issued a contract award last week that will provide highly reliable, secure and integrated voice, data, and video equipment for airborne U.S. senior leaders.

The nearly $209 million award to Rockwell Collins will allow the Air Force to retrofit a fleet of 20 special aircraft used to ferry senior U.S. officials, including the vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state and other high-ranking military and government members. While on board, these key leaders must be able to carry out their official, day-to-day duties and respond to emergency situations.

The effort, which will be completed between now and 2016, will result in a standardized, state-of-the-art command, control and communications (C3) system for the fleet, said Karl Gregor, a member of the Senior Leadership C3 System - Airborne Communications Program, referred to as SCP.

The current fleet includes 10 C-37s, four C-40s, four C-32s, and two C-20s. Each aircraft type currently has its own unique communications suite, said Mike Mason, a member of the program office team. Right now, the fleet lacks standardized capabilities and functionality. Those capabilities are needed for situational awareness, reach-back to home station resources, collaboration and command and control.

In addition to standardization and modernization, the new system should also be more compatible with what senior leaders use in their offices, said system engineer Paul Funch. This is important because these officials need to operate as smoothly and efficiently in flight as they can on the ground.

Specific hardware will include new routers, secure phones, video teleconferencing equipment, monitors and more.

The team plans to field the first package, on a C-37, by summer 2012. This will be preceded by an acquisition Milestone C decision, which grants authority to proceed with production and deployment, in 2011.

The program entered Milestone B (Engineering and Manufacturing Development) just before contract award, whereas a program generally needs Milestone B approval before proposals are even requested. This more aggressive track was made possible by several factors, the most significant being the maturity of the technology, which minimizes risk. Using a "firm, fixed price contract" also helped, as this minimizes government cost risk, according to program team member Robert Powell.

"It's also in line with what the Department of Defense wants programs to be using now," he said, noting that this contracting vehicle forces companies to be confident in their technologies and proposals.

Program officials cited use of a multifunctional independent review team, or MIRT, as another key factor that allowed the acquisition to move smoothly. The inclusion of Legal Office and Acquisition Excellence Office experts proved particularly helpful, they said.

"The MIRT process was very valuable in ensuring a clean request for proposal and a solid source selection," said Sean Finley, SCP deputy program manager.

The program team will move immediately to a post-award conference with the contractor and then to completion of a System Requirements Review this summer and a Preliminary Design Review by fall.

Throughout the effort, the team will use a modified KC-135 known as Test Tanker II to help test and integrate the technology. Though primarily a test asset, the plane also occasionally doubles as a transit platform for top Air Force leaders, which makes it the perfect platform for this kind of testing.

"That allows us to combine our testing with actual senior leader travel, and to get some significant feedback from them," Mr. Mason said last June, when Test Tanker II was on station at Hanscom. "It also eliminates the need to take an operational platform out of the field for testing."