Latest news with #Poquette
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Army targets 2028 to deliver future assault aircraft to soldiers
NASHVILLE, Tenn. − The Army plans to accelerate the delivery of its first production-representative Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft to soldiers in 2028 by moving into low-rate production while still testing prototypes, Col. Jeffrey Poquette, the service's FLRAA program manager, told Defense News. Army leadership has tasked itself to accelerate the fielding of FLRAA as part of a newly debuted transformation initiative. And while speeding up any major procurement program contains substantial risk, Army aviation leaders and Textron's Bell, the company chosen to build the service's brand new advanced tiltrotor, say the program is unique in the sense that significant risk was driven down through digital design, engineering and a technology demonstration effort, where it flew the V-280 Valor tiltrotor for over 200 hours. 'Normally you would build prototypes, then you would go to test,' Poquette said. 'And during test, you're not doing a whole lot of building. You're testing the aircraft and you're building up a body of engineering work and results [ahead of] a Milestone C [production] decision.' Typically, programs are in testing with prototypes for roughly two years prior to production decisions. 'We're not going to accelerate testing. We're not going to accelerate design,' he said. 'They're already very compressed, but what we can do is assume a little bit of risk and say, well maybe we can build aircraft during test.' With the test effort going on in the background with the eight prototypes that will have already been built, Bell would begin building production aircraft, he said. In 2027, the Army plans to make an early production decision ahead of Milestone C. The service is able to do so because there is already an option built into the current contract with Bell to exercise a low-rate production lot. While concurrency — when a program chooses to produce systems before proving final design out through the testing program — has led to program delays and, in some cases, demise, Bell and the Army are confident this time is different. Bell has assured the Army that it is 'very confident' in its digital engineering to the point that, 'although it may not be perfect, it'll be pretty close,' Poquette said. 'It's a continuation of production from our prototypes into early production representative aircraft,' Ryan Ehinger, Bell's FLRAA program manager, said. 'And it's a second iteration. We did the [Joint Multirole Technology Demonstrator]. That was a one-off aircraft. We've been doing manufacturing development from then through now in some of these advanced manufacturing technologies and techniques.' Bell also builds critical components like the wing, the blades and the gear boxes, he added. 'We've got our manufacturing technology center that has been iterating for years on some of these designs,' he said. Another lever the Army plans to try to pull to accelerate fielding is completing full-rate production in four or five years rather than in seven or eight. 'What we're asking Bell to do is build capacity faster to get to a full-rate production,' Poquette said. 'That means we get a company a year earlier, but we get a battalion 18 months earlier and we get two battalions 30 months earlier.' While the original plan was to conduct the initial operational test program in late FY31, the Army could also be able to enter that phase more quickly because it will already have aircraft built, according to Poquette. The IOT&E could potentially begin in the FY28 or FY29 time period.
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.'
