Wrap Around Maintenance Staging (WAMS)

Wrap Around Maintenance Staging (WAMS) is a Fall Arrest and access system designed for use with UK F-35 air vehicles. It provides access for inspection and maintenance tasks, while providing fall arrest mitigating the risk while Working at Height on the Aircraft. Procurement scope is for the manufacturing, installation and delivery of three WAMS units.

The contract will be awarded to Aviation Spares & Repairs (ASR) Ltd & will be for a term of 1 year. The Contract will have a value of £339K (Exclusive of VAT). The Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) Code is 34969200 - Passenger boarding stairs for aircraft.

Direct Award Justification:

The Lightning Delivery Team (LDT), part of the UK Ministry of Defence, intends to award a contract to Aviation Spares & Repairs (ASR) Ltd for the manufacture and production of Wrap Around Maintenance Staging (WAMS) to enable maintenance activities on the Lightning II aircraft (F-35).

It is considered that this contract can be awarded under Section 41 of the Procurement Act 2023 because the direct award justification specified in paragraph 7 of Schedule 5 (Additional or repeat goods, services or works) applies.

Working at Height equipment (WAMS) is required to allow the Lightning workforce to conduct aircraft maintenance activity safely and in line with Health & Safety (H&S) regulations. The staging must closely follow the contours of the aircraft due to H&S regulations so generic staging is not suitable or appropriate.

The original contract for WAMS was awarded to ASR Ltd via competition in 2018 under DSPCR 2011. As a result, ASR Ltd is the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) of the WAMS and has exclusive Intellectual Property (IP) rights to the technical drawings required to manufacture the staging. Only the OEM has the required technical drawings, tools, knowledge and expertise to manufacture staging that is compatible with the aircraft.

An unforeseen requirement for additional WAMS aircraft staging units has now arisen, to meet a need to expand concurrent maintenance activities. Compatibility across all the working at height assemblies is required so that the WAMS modules can be used interchangeably and allow flexibility across the capability. A different solution would result in two different sets of incompatible staging being used simultaneously, and the incompatibilities would create disproportionate technical difficulties in the operation and maintenance of the two sets of staging, therefore there are no reasonable alternatives.