Anyone who has strolled around an army or civil helicopter show in the USA lately cannot help but have noticed some strange rotary-wing birds that promise to morph between troop-carrying assault machines and armed gunships, bristling with cannons and Hellfire missiles. Full-scale mock-ups of the Bell Helicopter V-280 Valor and the Sikorsky S-97 Raider, and models of some other radical concepts, are – their creators hope – the future of rotary-wing aviation for the US military.
The US Army is under pressure to speed up its Future Vertical Lift (FVL) acquisition as it seeks permission from the Pentagon to begin pursuing a mid-sized Capability Set 3 (CS3) aircraft to eventually succeed the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk and Boeing AH-64 Apache.
Sometime in 2018 or 2019, Karem Aircraft will power up what it believes should be the American military’s next vertical lift system, the company’s patented optimum-speed tiltrotor.
Best known as the creator of the modern military drone, the company’s founder and namesake Abraham Karem is now devoting his attention to vertical takeoff and landing tiltrotors, with blades that rotate at the most efficient speed during all phases of hover and forward flight.
The frontrunner for this optimum-speed system was the A160 Hummingbird UAV: created by Karem’s Frontier Aircraft and later acquired by Boeing Defense, Space & Security. It demonstrated a highly efficient helicopter configuration that flew past 18h during one test.
In West Palm Beach, Florida, and Amarillo, Texas, two different aircraft are coming together in a sprint to the starting line of the Army’s much anticipated flight demonstrations of future helicopter concepts in 2017.
The Army plans to design and field a future vertical lift aircraft and is expected to kick off that program of record in the 2019 time frame. The expectation is to buy a new family of helicopters through a competition and field the new aircraft at some point in the early 2030s, although the Army has talked about speeding up that fielding timeline to the late 2020s.
But first the Army plans to demonstrate Joint Multi-Role (JMR) air vehicle capability at a 2017 flight demonstration in order to help the service fully define requirements for the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program.
A Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin team is mating the entire wing -- which is one big part -- onto the fuselage in Texas of its advanced tiltrotor concept the V-280 Valor, according to Vince Tobin, Bell’s vice president for advanced tiltrotor systems.
Sikorsky and Boeing have all of its Defiant coaxial helicopter parts in fabrication, some have already been delivered to the final assembly facility in Florida, Pat Donnelly, Boeing’s program director, said. Notably, the fuselage is in California being assembled and the team plans to conduct flight loads verification before shipping it to Florida.
The US House Armed Services panel on tactical air and land forces says in its mark of the fiscal year 2017 defence policy bill that current funding levels for FVL are “inadequate”.
The legislative proposal, which will be considered by the full committee on 27 April, seeks a briefing by the army on its FVL and Joint-MultiRole Technology Demonstrator efforts. That briefing would include a status report on the Bell V-280 Valor and Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant programmes as well as an analysis of “potential options and required resources” for accelerating FVL.
As the Pentagon considers the future of military vertical lift, Bell Helicopter is in talks with the US Navy and US Air Force to design a next-generation tiltrotor solution that could be ready by 2025.
Bell is partnered with Lockheed Martin to build a rotorcraft flight demonstrator as part of the US Army’s Joint Multi-Role program, which will gauge the art of the possible for the path ahead. The demonstrator program will inform the Army’s Future Vertical Lift effort to buy a new state-of-the-art family of helicopters in the 2030s.
But the demonstration effort may have implications beyond the Army. The Pentagon has indicated that FVL may eventually replace the Navy, US Marine Corps and Air Force military helicopters as well.
Sikorsky will conduct a significant amount of ground testing on its S-97 Raider before returning to flight trials, with just 2.2h of a 110h flight test programme clocked since the maiden flight in May.
S-97 chief test pilot Bill Fell says more testing will be done with ground-test rid at Sikorsky’s plant in West Palm Beach, Florida, to build “confidence” in the aircraft’s components ahead of further flights.
Speaking at an Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, Fell says the ground-test rig has already logged 40h of what is expected to be a 200h test run.
By 200h, Fell says the programme will have the “green light” to begin flying an expanded flight envelope. Sikorsky expects to reach top speeds of 220-230kt by next summer (June to August).
It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better yet to learn from other people’s. On Friday, I watched three battle-scarred acquisition experts — including the admiral who turned the F-35 around — advise a young officer from the Future Vertical Lift initiative, who was furiously taking notes. The panel’s theme: how FVL, which plans to replace a host of current helicopters, can avoid the errors of past programs like the F-35. The good news is the single most important lesson-learned is one FVL is already acting on. The bad news is that FVL’s approach, at least by one assessment, still raises half a dozen “red flags.”
The panel’s top three pointers: split the program into manageable pieces, take advantage of commercial helicopter expertise worldwide, and get Congress on board from the beginning.
The Pentagon must split FVL into multiple programs, developing a different aircraft for each set of mission requirement. That’s the opposite of a single mega-program trying to meet everyone’s needs with variants of one design, the approach behind the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
“Start separate programs when the money is ready,” advised retired Vice Adm. David Venlet, who knows the mistakes made by the F-35 program, since he took it over at its lowest point. “Those separate lines will be easier to defend and manage and, I think, have a better chance of success.”
FVL is already on that path, said Lt. Col. Alison Thompson, special assistant for rotorcraft to Pentagon procurement chief Frank Kendall. The sheer diversity of requirements for future rotorcraft demands a split approach. FVL is looking at four classes of rotorcraft — light, medium, heavy, and ultra-heavy — which will probably end up as four separate programs.
In fact, Thompson told me and another reporter, there may well be five programs. The medium FVL is set to enter service first, sometime in the early 2030s, but “if you look at the medium class” — comparable to the current H-60 Black Hawk/Sea Hawk series and Marine H-1s — “it is very broad, and we already know there’s not one platform can cover that spectrum of requirements,” she told us. That means “medium” may need to be split in two.
Even within a given weight class, there’s the question whether a single program can successfully produce both utility and attack versions of a given design. “It would be very desirable,” Thompson told us, and the Marines manage it in the medium category with their UH-1Y Huey transport and AH-1W Super Cobra gunship, which have about 85 percent of their parts in common. By contrast, the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk and its AH-64 Apache are entirely different designs, but, said Patterson,” if you look at the things any helicopter needs to fly — drive train, engine, communications — “there are lot of things you can have in common.”
