Latest news with #ArmyAviationAssociationofAmerica
Axios
21-05-2025
- Business
- Axios
Screaming Eagles will be first to get U.S. Army's MV-75
The 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, will be the first to receive the MV-75 Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft. Why it matters: The Bell Textron-made tiltrotor will replace a significant portion of the Black Hawk helicopter fleet. The yearslong FLRAA competition pitted some of the biggest names in defense against each other. Driving the news: Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus revealed the plan at the Army Aviation Association of America's conference in Tennessee. "This aircraft changes how we move forces. More importantly, it changes the geometry of ground combat," he said. "And we're not waiting for a distant out-year to make this thing real." "The 101st flies into real-world contested environments, across wide terrain, often without the luxury of fixed support infrastructure. They need speed, endurance, and reliability." Catch up quick: Bell bested a Sikorsky-Boeing team in 2022. The Government Accountability Office denied a contract protest in 2023. Fun fact: The MV-75 designation refers to its multi-mission assignments (air assault, medical evacuation and resupply), its vertical-takeoff-and-landing capabilities and the establishment of the Army in 1775.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Army aviation charts new course as it grapples with surprise cuts
Army aviation leaders were caught off guard by some of the sweeping changes to the service's overall force structure and are now scrambling to align plans with the top brass' shifting vision, which includes abrupt moves to cancel or scale back key programs like a modernized aircraft engine, spy planes and larger runway-dependent unmanned aircraft. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll issued memos within a day of each other earlier this month announcing major changes to command structure and formations and changes to acquisition and modernization efforts, including canceling programs while boosting others. But, despite the surprise, leaders across the aviation branch said they are embracing change and working to shape the role aviation will play in future operations. The announcement from the top 'was a little abrupt,' Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army's Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Novosel, Alabama, told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee, last week. 'Some of the decisions that were made were not exactly what we had proposed, but they were decisions in the context of the folks in the Pentagon who are looking at the entirety of the Army budget, the priority systems which are not all aviation-centric,' Gill said. 'I would even argue that we're not the Army's priority. We're looking at air-and-missile defense, counter-[unmanned aircraft systems], UAS protection,' he said, adding that with a fixed budget, decisions on what to prioritize are tougher. 'It's no surprise that the Army made some tough cuts. Some of them were just maybe deeper than we thought they were going to be,' Gill said. Some portions of the restructuring effort demonstrate how the Army is looking to transform its aviation capability, which begins with divesting old equipment. The service was already deep into that effort, Gill noted. Toward the end of 2023, the Army decided to trim its UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter fleet by 8%. Months later, it canceled its Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft competition before selecting a winner to build prototypes. It also divested its Lima and Victor model UH-60s in favor of modernizing the service's most capable variant, the Mike model. The service was already working on ways to end the AH-64 Delta-model Apache attack helicopter fleet and move over to a pure fleet of the most modernized version, the Echo-model. 'All the Army Transformation Initiative did was accelerate,' Gill said. 'They made some very clear decisions that sort of answered a bunch of [requests for information] that we had.' As part of the new cuts, the Army has decided to end procurement of the Gray Eagle UAS for the active force, cancel a competitive effort to replace the Shadow UAS with a new Future Tactical UAS and halve the number of new spy planes it planned to buy as part of the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, program. The Army also said it plans to cease developing the Improved Turbine Engine Program, a decades-long effort to replace the engines in Black Hawks and Apaches. The ITEP engine powered a Black Hawk in a hover for the first time last week. The Army also plans to inactivate one air cavalry squadron per combat aviation brigade in the active component and said it would cancel the planned activation of the 12th CAB, according to an Army execution order obtained by Defense News. Aviation leadership had 'teed up a number of options' related to equipment and formations and had already shared them with Army leadership, Gill said. The branch was supposed to head into an Army Requirements Oversight Council meeting this month with some of those proposals. 'I think with some of those proposals, all this did was accelerate a whole bunch of staff churn and just say, 'Hey, here's where we are,'' he said. Even so, Gill noted 'we only got this two weeks ago, and so we don't know all the details of it,' Gill said. 'I think our job, collectively, as is the case for the rest of the Army, is to do mission analysis on what we were told to do and then provide options to senior leaders, and in some cases, it'll be ways that we can execute exactly what they told us to do. And it might be even like, you know, saying, 'Hey, here are all the consequences. Is that still the order?'' While some decisions may have been surprising, Army aviation leaders said they acknowledge the need for change across the service. 'We need to divest faster, and we need to iterate and procure and probably continue to iterate and procure on newer technologies that we think are emerging, given the context of the operating environment that we see both east and west of us,' Gill said. One of the newer priorities for the Army within the aviation portfolio is to accelerate the service's planned procurement of a Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, which Textron's Bell is building in the prototyping phase. The goal now is to try to deliver some production-level platforms to soldiers by 2028 instead of in 2031. The Army is also planning to focus on developing and rapidly fielding UAS and launched effects across the force to operate at different echelons and across a wide variety of mission sets. As Army aviation becomes a more complex array of manned, unmanned and uncrewed systems, branch leadership is working to design a force that relies more heavily on sending drones forward on the battlefield rather than manned aircraft to do some of the missions manned aircraft used to do, like armed reconnaissance. As part of an initiative begun by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George over a year ago, the service started a 'transformation in contact' initiative where units were given new capabilities and free rein to use them extensively during exercises to see what works and what doesn't and how new equipment might work in various formations. A large focus of the effort was on bringing UAS into the fold at the brigade level. George also pushed for a new, more flexible way to fund UAS procurement rapidly and more often. The aviation branch is 'absolutely changing the ways we've been doing business,' Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the Army's program executive officer for aviation, said at the Army Aviation Association of America conference last week. 'We're executing in ways that we haven't before by building these tranches of capability a lot faster and that's in every level of UAS space today,' Phillips said. 'We always joke that two things change the outcome of programs … elections and wars,' Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, the Army's G-3/5/7 aviation director, said. 'We just had an election and we'll have another in four years and we'll have a change of Congress in two years. All of those things impact … our ability to do what the Army wants to do and we have to work within that constraint,' he added. 'I think you'll see some of that play out here over the next few months,' Braman noted.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New US Army helo engine lifts off, but may be headed for cancellation
NASHVILLE, Tenn. − For the first time, the Army's UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopter lifted off the ground into a hover at a Sikorsky test facility, powered by the improved turbine engine that has been in development since the mid-2000s, according to the service's program executive officer for aviation. But as the Improved Turbine Engine Program leaps that hurdle toward the finish line, the effort is in jeopardy as the service looks to cut large programs to make way for the pursuit of what it sees as higher priorities amid the need to cut its budget by 8% as directed by the defense secretary. Army Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. James Mingus told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America confab here that the service is waiting to see where it lands with the fiscal 2026 budget. Officials are trying to gauge how much flexibility the service has in the budget reconciliation process to fully understand if it can afford to pay for ITEP. 'The future of ITEP is largely going to depend on where all these things land inside the '26 budget,' Mingus said. Currently, there is no funding planned to move the program from development into production. Amid mixed messages on the engine's fate over the past several weeks, following the release of an Army directive outlining sweeping change to the service dubbed by the service secretary as the Army Transformation Initiative, Army aviation leaders are working on various potential paths for the engine. Options include outright cancellation, a continuation of the development program followed by its closeout, or a decision to proceed into production. 'We have two weeks, and now there are several programs named, you know, each of them come with a set of courses of action that we have been working on to make sure that we can meet Army senior leaders' intent,' Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the Army's program executive officer for aviation, told reporters May 15 at the Army Aviation Association of America. The ITEP program kicked off in a competition 15 years ago to replace the engines in both the UH-60 and the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. But the engine effort has been plagued by various delays across its life as the service wrestled with funding, development strategies and a protest from the Advanced Turbine Engine Company – a Honeywell and Pratt & Whitney team, which competed against General Electric's aerospace division to build the engine for the Army. More recently, the engine was hit with more delays due to technical issues as well as the coronavirus pandemic, which caused supply chain problems. When GE won the contract, it touted a plan to move more quickly, but that window to accelerate closed and the Army subsequently predicted a two-year delay getting the T901 engine into the UH-60 Black Hawk, the first aircraft in the current fleet to receive the new tech. The Army was able to garner some important data when it chose to integrate the ITEP onto two competitive prototypes for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. The companies in that competition – Bell and Sikorsky – had both received the engines and were installing them when the service decided to cancel the FARA program early last year. When the service canceled the FARA pursuit, it also delayed a production decision for the ITEP engine by three years. Sikorsky had taken advantage of fiscal 2024 FARA program funding before the Army officially closed the program at the end of the year to run tests of the ITEP in the prototype, ahead of integrating the engine into the UH-60, in order to drive down risk. The company received the first ITEP engines for the Black Hawk last fall and began ground runs earlier this year. 'We're currently still under contract to execute the program we were for ITEP,' Rich Benton, Sikorsky's head, told Defense News in an interview at the AAAA event. 'There's still budget in 2025 to continue that work. Will there be budget in the future years or not? You know, that's up to the Army and the [congressional] appropriators,' he said. 'The budget we have today, we'll get the Black Hawk in the air,' he said in a May 14 interview. 'How much flying and how much data we get from that will be up to the Army,' Benton said. 'We're looking at a path ahead in real time on the options and the options could be finish [integration], because there's not just the aircraft integration going on, but there's also the engine qualification testing that is going on in test stands,' Phillips said. 'We've had engines in test stands now for several years gathering low altitude, high altitude, low performance, high performance data. All of that data is very rich and informing the path ahead.' Additionally, the Army continues to have discussions with its joint partners regarding their interest in the engine and how they might integrate it onto their aircraft and a potential path forward there, according to Phillips. And foreign partners have also asked the same question about how they could potentially move forward with the ITEP engine as well. 'We're presenting all those, on how we could get Army senior leaders to meet their intent but get the most out of the dollars that we've invested in the program,' he said. Overall, the Army has spent over an estimated $1.5 billion over the past two decades on ITEP and its precursor development. The service had spent approximately $720 million on the program by 2016. The Army's contracts to competitors in 2016 totaled $256 million and the service awarded a $517 million contract for the engineering and manufacturing development phase to GE in 2019. What is under consideration for a different path to modernize the Black Hawk and Apache's engines, if the Army chooses to end the ITEP program prior to production, is unclear. 'If I had to decide today, hey, if that engine isn't going to be available in the future, what would I do differently? Integrate a different engine? I would quickly pivot to the engine the [Special Operations forces] flies. The SOF flies with a more powerful engine,' Benton said. 'Today it's been integrated in Black Hawk, it has been demonstrated. It is available today, so there would be commonality that would provide some more capability than I have today, [but] not as much as ITEP.' The Army is 'always looking at new ways to provide more performance to the aircraft, whether it's making components lighter, whether it's adding more power, whether it's adding additional fuel consumption capabilities,' Phillips said, 'We always look at that and I think we'll continue to look at that regardless of the outcome.'
