Latest news with #JamesMingus
Business Insider
24-05-2025
- Automotive
- Business Insider
See the MV-75 tiltrotor set to be the US Army's next premier air assault vehicle and replace the UH-60 Black Hawk
It flies like a helicopter, cruises like a plane, and could redefine how the US Army fights wars within the next decade. The Army chose the Bell V-280 Valor as its next-generation assault aircraft, designed to fly longer and faster than current rotorcraft. Officially designated the MV-75, the Army is betting on the Bell tiltrotor to modernize its aging fleet of military helicopters. For nearly 50 years, the UH-60 Black Hawk has been the Army's airborne workhorse. The Army plans to continue flying the Black Hawk for the next several years as it fast-tracks the rollout of the new tiltrotor replacement fleet in the 2030s. Bell V-280 Valor Developed by Bell Textron, a Texas-based aerospace company, the V-280 was designed with "transformational increases in speed, range, and maneuverability," the Army said in a 2020 release. Propelled by two Rolls-Royce turboshaft engines, the V-280's tiltrotor design allows the aircraft to take off and land vertically like a helicopter and fly like an airplane, like the Bell Boeing MV-22 Osprey. In order to be a contender for the Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, the competing aircraft were required to cruise at speeds of up to 322 miles per hour — nearly twice as fast as the Black Hawk's cruising speed of 174 mph. The aircraft was expected to carry up to 14 fully equipped passengers or accommodate external payloads of up to 10,000 pounds. The FLRAA also had to be able to operate at 6,000 feet in temperatures up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit and fly at least 1,700 nautical miles without refueling. A 'leap ahead' Gen. James Mingus, the Army's vice chief of staff, described the MV-75 as a "leap ahead in technology and capability." "It delivers operational reach that alters how we close with the enemy," Mingus said at the Army Aviation Association of America conference on May 14. "It brings the right combination of speed, payload, and survivability we've never had in one aircraft." The concept is that each MV-75 can rush over a dozen heavily loaded troopers onto assault missions that can catch an enemy off guard. Next-generation military helicopters Bell's V-280 Valor was selected in 2022 as the Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, chosen over the Sikorsky-Boeing Defiant X. The FLRAA is part of the Army's broader effort to modernize its aerial fleet, known as Future Vertical Lift. The Army also planned to develop a new armed scout helicopter known as the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, but the program was canceled earlier this year to prioritize the fielding of the MV-75. The Army is "not just committed to the programme, but how we do it faster as well," Mingus said. Multimission Vertical Takeoff The "M" in the aircraft's designation refers to its multimission purpose, and the "V" represents its vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capability. While the MV-75 design has yet to be finalized, the future tiltrotor is expected to have a baseline variant that will incorporate features to adapt it to special operations. After entering the engineering and manufacturing stage last year, Bell is under contract to build six prototypes of the MV-75. The Texas-based aerospace company projects to complete its first flight in 2026 and low-rate initial production in 2028. The aircraft is slated to be delivered to the Army around 2030. 'Rapid response and enhanced maneuverability' The next-generation aircraft is expected to serve on missions involving vertical lift, air assault, maritime interdiction, medical evacuation, combat search and rescue, humanitarian relief, and tactical resupply. 101st Airborne Division The 101st Airborne Division, the only Army division specializing in air assault operations, is set to be the first frontline unit to field the MV-75. For nearly six decades, the unit's Combat Aviation Brigade has been operating assault helicopters, such as AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopters, UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopters, and CH-47F Chinook heavy-lift helicopters. "The 101st flies into real-world contested environments, across wide terrain, often without the luxury of fixed support infrastructure," Mingus said. "They need speed, endurance, and reliability." Preparing for a fight in the Pacific The modernization of the Army's aerial fleet comes as the US military prepares for a potential conflict with China. The long-range mobility of the Army's future aircraft fleet is essential for the vast Pacific theater, consisting of island chains separated by long distances and limited Army infrastructure in the region. The Future Vertical Lift initiative is also focused on enhancing survivability against Chinese and Russian air defenses by equipping future aircraft with high-speed capabilities and reduced radar signatures. Autonomous and semi-autonomous flight Amid the Pentagon's push for AI use within its ranks, the Army is also looking to integrate autonomous and semi-autonomous flight technology into its systems, including the MV-75. "The Army wants to make sure that aircraft can be unmanned," Textron CEO Scott Donnelly said during an earnings call in April. In December 2019, the V-280 Valor successfully completed an autonomous test flight at the company's research center in Arlington, Texas, though two pilots remained onboard to intervene if necessary.
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
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Army halts tactical UAS competition without clear plan forward
After roughly seven years, the Army has decided not to continue down its current path to find and procure an unmanned aircraft that replaces its now-retired Shadow drones for Brigade Combat Teams. While it knows what it doesn't want, the service is still trying to figure out exactly what it does want and how to acquire capability rapidly. 'It's not that we don't want a Future Tactical UAS. It's just the one that was being developed didn't meet our needs,' Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual conference. As part of a larger directive issued by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to make major changes to structure, formations and programs, the Army decided to cancel the FTUAS program just as two vendors had just wrapped up a competitive flight demonstration phase. 'There's a misnomer of, 'We've killed FTUAS,'' Mingus said. 'We still need short, medium, long-range unmanned systems that can sense, they can see, they can extend the network, they can kill, they're kinetic, they're [electronic warfare], they do all those things and so we're still going to invest in systems like that.' The decision comes after the Army approved just one year ago the characteristics it wants in an FTUAS and awarding contracts to two teams competing to build the drone. The Army has been trying to replace its Shadow UAS fleet for years but officially retired it in early 2024. The service then looked to figure out how to possibly accelerate a fielding timetable for FTUAS, but there wasn't enough funding available to move more quickly, then-director of Army aviation at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen, said last year at AAAA. The service invested money in fiscal 2025 to buy prototypes from both Griffon Aerospace and Textron and fly them over the next few years. 'The goodness about FTUAS is going to be the plug-and-play things … that you can put on it,' Lt. Gen. Karl Gringrich, Army G-8, said in an interview a year ago. 'The ability to put on a network extension, the ability to put a, potentially in the future, lethal payload. [Electro-Optical Infrared] sensors, [electronic warfare],' he listed. Among key characteristics for the FTUAS, in addition to rapid capability insertions, the Army wants the aircraft to be runway independent, have on-the-move command-and-control and soldier-led field level maintenance. The Army began considering requirements for a replacement for its Textron-made Shadow drone in 2018. By 2019, it had narrowed the pool of competitors to a Martin UAV-Northrop Grumman team, Textron Systems, L3Harris Technologies and Arcturus UAV. Aerovironment purchased Arcturus in 2021, while Shield AI bought Martin UAV in the same year. The service evaluated the four drone offerings with operational units over the period of a year, culminating in a spring 2021 rodeo at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Army awarded Aerovironment an $8 million contract in August 2022 to provide the Jump 20 UAS as an interim FTUAS capability for a single brigade. The Army had planned to field FTUAS to the first unit equipped in 2026. The service's project officer for UAS was asked to put together three courses of action within 30 days to the Army's acquisition branch to stop current FTUAS development, Col. Danielle Medaglia, the project manager for Army UAS, said at AAAA. Those were due May 14. 'Right now the plan is we're going to continue the developmental tests. We're doing that with both vendors and, from there, the Army is going to make a decision whether we want to just provide them the jump start [to] the Brigade [directed requirement] and they're also, hey, we have to transfer that technology,' Medaglia said. 'There is some new technology on that, in that Group 3 space that both vendors brought to bear and there's no way the Army would lose out on that,' she added, 'so how we transfer that technology is a really, really big deal.' While Griffon did not participate in the first round of FTUAS demonstrations when the Army opened the competition back up to industry again in 2023, the company had already been quietly working on its solution, keeping in mind the size and modularity the Army really needed to accommodate the sensors and effects it wants on such a platform. 'We really view ourselves as building aerial pickup trucks because in the world of UAS, the actual air vehicle should be the thing you think about the least while conducting a mission,' Jordan French, Griffon program manager for tactical UAS, told Defense News in a recent interview. 'The air vehicle is certainly the most critical piece because if you don't have it, you can't do the mission,' he added. 'That being said, operators must have complete confidence in the air vehicle so they can stay focused on the mission and the other critical components of the UAS that apply effects and situational awareness.' Griffon has focused deeply on its modular open-system architecture and its interfaces, so in the instance a customer wants something, whatever it is, it's essentially plug-and-play, French explained. The technology of the airframe also departs from the typical hybrid quadcopter or tail-sitter platform that's often seen among Group 3-sized UAS, which weigh less than 1,320 pounds. 'We took a complete clean sheet approach,' French said. The company focused on developing a system that used a series hybrid, combining an internal combustion engine with an electric motor. The aircraft also features four tiltrotors. 'The powerful thing about our tiltrotors is the ability to thrust vector our propulsion forces,' French said. 'So instead of like a quad copter having to rely on just RPM to yaw or pitch and roll the aircraft, you can actually keep the wings level and use dynamic thrust vectoring to maneuver the aircraft in hover and through transitions to forward flight.' The series-hybrid capability also allows the UAS to operate silently, which is a departure from the RQ-7b Shadow engine's lawn-mower-like acoustic signature. 'At only a few 100 yards away, Valiant is virtually silent,' French said. Should the Army decide to buy more systems at a larger scale, 'Griffon has completed all of the major milestones of the current rapid prototyping effort and is already in production for other customers and ready to begin production for FTUAS,' French said. Griffon builds several hundred Group 3 aircraft for various customers a month, he noted. Textron, the other team competing in the most recent flight demonstrations, declined to provide comment to Defense News. In October last year, the Army chief of staff signed a directed requirement to get a brigade-level UAS capability out to six Transformation in Contact Brigades by the end of calendar year 2025, according to Chief Warrant Officer 5 Micah Amman, who is the requirements development lead for FTUAS within the Army's cross-functional team for Future Vertical Lift. 'We still believe that a UAS at the Brigade level is still necessary in order to set the conditions for the rest of the Brigade,' Amman said. To find options, the Army cast a wide net and asked industry to show them how they are filling capability needs with technology. 'We need a brigade-level capability and, I think, this is just me, we don't know yet. We're still trying to learn some of these things,' Amman said. 'I think we absolutely need to be defined by formations, by [combatant commands]. So what I need at sea level might be different than what I need in the mountains, what I need in cold weather might be different than what I need in hot weather from a material standpoint,' Amman said, adding, 'How do I need the system to perform, to carry those effects? 'And the effects that I need based on the scenario might be different as well, like where my [electro-optic infrared radar] might need to be different based on what the joint or multinational force is bringing to the fight, where the radios or other types of effects might be important to the brigade.' The only document that still exists unchanged for Brigade-level UAS is the Army chief's directed requirement, said Col. Nick Ryan, the Army capability manager for UAS within the service's Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate. 'We haven't been told to relook that, to reevaluate that, to revise that. That is what is approved and that is what is out there right now and if we had funding today that is what we would go with,' he said.
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.'
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.'
