One of the most important responsibilities of the Department is to rapidly respond to critical threats to our diplomatic missions and personnel overseas, including affliction of eligible personnel with unique and highly pathogenic infectious diseases. DOS responses must be appropriate and, of equal importance, timely. Therefore, the Department must equip itself with the tools and capabilities that best enable its response to be safe, accurate, and immediate. DOS must have a scalable aviation capability that can: (1) perform medical evacuation (with or without biocontainment capability); (2) deploy crisis response personnel; (3) move senior interlocutors to and from sensitive diplomatic engagements; (4) transport mission critical supplies and medical material; (5) deploy and/or extract eligible persons and sensitive cargo from posts in crisis, high-threat posts, or other high-threat environments; (6) provide aviation support to security and protection operations; and (7) leverage biocontainment expertise to assist the Department with the maintenance and upkeep of the Department’s biocontainment aero-medical evacuation equipment.
The Department requires a multi-mission aviation support services contract (MMASS) with the capability to evacuate critically ill patients, including those infected with highly pathogenic infectious diseases (HPIDs), from places where traditional air ambulances cannot or will not go. These services are required on an unscheduled and often emergency basis demanding a high degree of reliability and mission assurance. From the Department’s experience with SARS and the Ebola Virus Disease, many aviation support providers are unwilling to provide any aviation services into countries with active HPID outbreaks and lack the capability to transport such individuals, hence it is critical that the MMASS contractor possess biocontainment capability. Successfully executing such missions entails coordinating several related services and requirements. In such circumstances, attempting to coordinate the activities of multiple contractors working on a related requirement with a common objective is likely to result in undue schedule delays and increased mission risk and cost. Communications with multiple vendors performing different parts of related work impact the Department’s readiness posture and introduce unacceptable technical risk in cases where even minutes of lost time could result in the loss of life, limb, or eyesight of patients, or in cases involving personnel recovery or support to allied nations, the loss of even small windows of time jeopardizes the success of the mission, as missed deadlines combined with a fluctuating political climate may result in mission failure.
In order to maximize the flexibility and cost efficiency of this standing capability, the Government requires that a single Contractor provide all services using a multi-mission capable aircraft and crew, using an airframe with sufficient range and seating capacity to efficiently deploy personnel and retrieve personnel and casualties from anywhere in the world, with a modular configuration that can quickly transition between passenger transport, cargo transport, medical evacuation, and biocontainment mission requirements. Such a capability is a tool that optimizes DOS’s ability to fulfill its responsibilities to deployed personnel, American citizens, and eligible persons around the world. While support to urgent medical, biocontainment, security, and personnel recovery/transport missions in high-threat or high-risk environments represent the priority mission-set for multi-mission aviation support services, current guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration requires the Department to maximize the value to the U.S. taxpayer for Government Aircraft, including those procured as Commercial Aviation Services (“CAS”). Hence, at times when MMASS services are not urgently required to support biocontainment, medical, security, personnel transport/recovery missions, the Department anticipates that MMASS resources may be utilized to support a broad array of additional missions using MMASS contract aviation assets.
In sum, the Department has made a reasonable determination to procure multi-mission aviation support services supporting the breath of Operational Medicine Program aviation activities through a total package approach and seeks a single contractor to provide services using a multi-mission capable aircraft and crew. The Department has determined that use of multiple vendors introduces unacceptable technical risk and delay in the execution of missions that are both time sensitive, politically sensitive, and where schedule slippage by even minutes can result in the loss of life or another catastrophic injury. Additionally, the MMASS contractor must be able to provide all of the required services using a platform that can mitigate risks from HPIDs to the aircraft and crew, ensuring that whatever aviation service is required – such service can be safely executed in regions impacted by HPIDs. The Department has further concluded that awarding a single contract for these services will result in economies of scale and consolidated administrative costs; the use of multiple vendors, each operating under the stringent readiness requirements required under this contract, will result in significant and unnecessary fixed overhead costs without a significant return on investment for the American tax payer. Award to a single vendor capable of supporting all requirements using a multi-mission platform allows the Department to abate duplicative managerial time, cost, and contract administrative oversight. Thus, the Department is satisfying this requirement under a total package approach and requires the services of an experienced aviation services contractor to integrate the full breadth of aviation support services for ongoing security, secure transport, and medical contingency responses.
The objective of this contract is to obtain on-call aircraft services for use by DOS to:
- Perform medical evacuation (with or without biocontainment capability)
- Deploy crisis response personnel
- Move senior interlocutors to and from sensitive diplomatic engagements
- Transport mission-critical supplies and medical material
- Deploy and/or extract eligible persons and sensitive cargo from posts in crisis, high-threat posts, or other high-threat environments
- Provide aviation support to security and protection operations
- Leverage biocontainment expertise to assist the Department with the maintenance and upkeep of the Department’s biocontainment aero-medical evacuation equipment.
