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Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Here's who's getting the Army's first long-range assault aircraft
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The U.S. Army will field its first Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, commonly known as FLRAA, to the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the Army vice chief of staff told an audience at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual conference Wednesday. 'That decision was based on their mission profile and theater demands,' Gen. James Mingus said in prepared remarks. 'This decision makes sense, the 101st is a formation built to deploy rapidly and operate in austere conditions. 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.' The operational insights from that first fielding 'will shape initial doctrine, sustainment models, and maneuver concepts,' Mingus stated. 'And we're not waiting for a distant out-year to make this thing real. Under the Army Transformation Initiative, we are driving to get this aircraft online years ahead of schedule." When the Army will field these first aircraft remains to be seen, but the service has recently vowed to move faster to build and field the first FLRAA that is presently expected to be delivered in 2030. 'We expect to field the first aircraft in 2030 and that's according to the plan as it stands today,' Col. Jeffrey Poquette, the service's project manager for the program, told Defense News in an interview earlier this spring. He added that there 'are opportunities ... the Army is looking at to potentially see if we can go do something different and there's different risks for going faster.' Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George testified during a recent House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing that he thinks the Army could move up the timeline to 2028. 'We're just figuring out what we can do by working with them on how we can pull it as far left,' George said. The service is finalizing its design for FLRAA by the end of the year that will ultimately take the place of UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters. Bell beat out Lockheed Martin's Sikorsky and a Boeing team following a competitive technology demonstration phase, in which each company built a flying demonstrator. Sikorsky and Boeing's Defiant X featured coaxial rotor blades. The design process for FLRAA, which will culminate in a critical design review either sometime toward the end of this fiscal year or in the beginning of the next, has allowed the Army to move much faster than in previous aircraft development programs, Poquette said. 'When we had our ... preliminary design review we got to see and have access to that design on a level we've never had, which is going to make for a much better CDR,' he said. 'We have a compressed test schedule. That's really where the benefits of digital engineering are going to pay off.'
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US Army finalizing future aircraft design with hopes to field faster
The U.S. Army is working toward finalizing its design by the end of the year for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft that will ultimately replace the UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter, as the service hopes to speed up its fielding to earlier than 2030, according to the project manager in charge of the effort. The service has had 'unprecedented access to the design [in] real time' of FLRAA through Bell's rigorous digital engineering, Col. Jeffrey Poquette, the service's project manager for the program, said in a recent interview. The Army chose the Textron subsidiary at the end of 2022 to build a tiltrotor aircraft that is expected to fly twice as fast and twice as far as a Black Hawk. Bell beat out a Lockheed Martin's Sikorsky and Boeing team following a competitive technology demonstration phase where each built a flying demonstrator. Sikorsky and Boeing's Defiant X featured coaxial rotor blades. The design process for FLRAA, which will culminate in a critical design review either sometime toward the end of this fiscal year or in the beginning of the next, has allowed the Army to move much faster than in previous aircraft development programs, Poquette said. 'When we had our ... preliminary design review we got to see and have access to that design on a level we've never had, which is going to make for a much better CDR,' he said, and 'we have a compressed test schedule. That's really where the benefits of digital engineering are going to pay off.' Essentially, the process allows the Army and Bell to build prototypes in the engineering manufacturing and development phase that 'are as close to what we want as possible,' Poquette said. The Army is planning to compress a test schedule that historically has taken anywhere from four to even 10 years in other vertical lift aviation programs to just a two-year period, according to Poquette. 'We're not going to find big, expensive things. We're not going to find safety things. We're going to find small things that we have to tweak,' he said. 'We found things in PDR, and they fixed it, and now we know that we're going to have the architecture right to meet [the modular open system architecture] and that kind of thing.' Bell has established a special systems integration lab, or SIL, for FLRAA in Arlington, Texas, to continue to develop and check out aircraft design and behaviors. 'Every mission that the test aircraft will fly will be first flown in the SIL,' Ryan Ehringer, Bell's FLRAA program manager, said in the same interview. The SIL will be coupled with 200-plus flight hours in Bell's V-280 Valor tiltrotor demonstrator through a competitive Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program built to drive down risk for the future aircraft. This approach, when joined by a variety of other subsystem testing efforts, 'reduces risk tremendously,' Ehringer said. The Army also believes it has the buy-in necessary from the current presidential administration to continue to progress with the program, even demonstrating capability for new Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll at a joint capstone experimentation event in California called Project Convergence earlier this year. 'We expect to field the first aircraft in 2030 and that's according to the plan as it stands today,' Poquette said, adding that there 'are opportunities ... the Army is looking at to potentially see if we can go do something different and there's different risks for going faster.'
