About $4.89B to Bell Helicopter Textron — a contract begun in October 1992 and ended in June 2017, running 24.7 years, its description empty

1One contract across a quarter century

The period runs from 1992-10-15 to 2017-06-30, or 24.7 years. One contract number stayed alive for a quarter of a century.

Across the 207 Department of Defense contracts this site holds as of 2026-09-01 the median period is 10.7 years and the mean 11.9. While 122 run ten years or more, close to six in ten, those beyond twenty are few. On equipment kept in service for a long time, an original contract can continue while being amended.

2A long contract is built from accumulated amendments

In federal contracting the obligated amount is not settled at once; it accumulates through modifications. A period of 24.7 years means that accumulation ran a long while.

What appears in the record is the cumulative amount and the start and end dates. How many modifications there were in between, and how much accumulated at which point, cannot be read from it. The longer the contract, the harder it becomes to see what lies behind a single figure.

3The description stays empty

Nothing is recorded in the description. Of the 207 Department of Defense contracts this site holds as of 2026-09-01, fifteen are empty in that field, this record among them.

What can be read is that the Defense Contract Management Agency administers it, that the recipient is a company known for building helicopters, that it runs 24.7 years from 1992 to 2017, and that about $4,885.21 million stands obligated. Outlays are recorded as zero, but the contract ended in 2017, so an artefact of reporting is the natural reading.

4What the record shows, and what it does not

A period of 24.7 years means one contract number stayed alive for a quarter of a century. What can be read from the record, though, is only its two ends.

Obligations on a federal contract are not settled at once; they accumulate through successive modifications. The longer the contract, the harder it is to see what lies behind the single figure in the record. Outlays stand at zero although the contract ended in 2017, which reads more naturally as an artefact of the reporting arrangement.