The U.S. Army is nearing a critical milestone in the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program, which will replace the legendary UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter. Design of the FLRAA is targeted for completion by the end of the year, with hopes of bringing the aircraft into service sooner than 2030, according to project manager Col. Jeffrey Poquette.
Col. Poquette emphasized in a recent interview that Bell’s meticulous digital engineering work has given the Army “unprecedented access to the real-time design” of the FLRAA. The Army selected Bell, a subsidiary of Textron, to develop a tiltrotor aircraft that is expected to fly twice as fast and twice as far as the Black Hawk by the end of 2022.
Bell had outperformed Lockheed Martin's Sikorsky and Boeing partnership after a competitive technology demonstration phase in which each built a flying demonstrator aircraft. Sikorsky and Boeing's prototype, called the Defiant X, featured coaxial rotor blades.
Digital Engineering Increases Speed
The FLRAA design process will culminate in a critical design review toward the end of this fiscal year or early next year, allowing the Army to move forward much more quickly than previous aircraft development programs, Colonel Poquette said.
“When we did our preliminary design review, we had the opportunity to see and access this design at a level we never had before, which will allow for a much better CDR (Critical Design Review),” Poquette said. “We have a compressed test program. That’s really where the benefits of digital engineering are going to pay off.”
This process essentially allows the Army and Bell to produce prototypes “as close as possible to what we want” in the engineering, manufacturing and development phases, Colonel Poquette said. The Army plans to compress a test program that takes four to 10 years for other vertical-lift aviation programs into just two years for FLRAA.
“We’re not going to find big, expensive things. We’re not going to find security things. We’re going to find little things that we need to adjust,” Poquette said. “We found things in the PDR (Preliminary Design Review) and they fixed them, and now we know we’re going to have the right architecture to accommodate [modular open systems architecture] and those kinds of things.”
Private Laboratory and Demonstrator Aircraft Experience Reduces Risks
Bell established a dedicated Systems Integration Lab (SIL) in Arlington, Texas, to continue to develop and test aircraft design and behavior for FLRAA.
“Every mission that the test aircraft will fly will be first conducted at SIL,” Ryan Ehringer, Bell’s FLRAA program manager, said in the same interview. SIL will be combined with more than 280 flight hours gained with Bell’s V-200 Valor tiltrotor demonstrator through the competitive Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program, which was created to reduce risk for future aircraft.
Ehringer emphasized that this approach, when combined with various other subsystem testing efforts, “reduces risk tremendously.”
High-Level Support and Hope for Rapid Progress
The Army also believes it has the support it needs from the current presidential administration to keep the program moving forward, with new Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll even being shown FLRAA’s capabilities at a joint capstone event called Project Convergence in California earlier this year.
“We expect to field the first aircraft in 2030, and that’s the current plan,” Col. Poquette said. “The Army is looking at opportunities potentially to see if we can do something different, and there are different risks to going faster.” These statements suggest the Army is evaluating the potential to accelerate the program, but is also aware of the risks that could come with doing so.
In conclusion, the FLRAA program, the next-generation attack aircraft to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, is progressing at a promising pace thanks to digital engineering and previous demonstrator aircraft experience. The design is expected to be completed by the end of the year and the potential for entry into service to be brought forward to 2030 is considered a significant development for the future air power capabilities of the U.S. Army.
