Showing posts with label
Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator.
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Showing posts with label
Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator.
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The first Future Vertical Lift aircraft to be fielded by the Army will come in the medium-lift category, where attack and cargo lift helicopters reside, Maj. Gen. William Gayler, the new Army Aviation Center of Excellence commander at Fort Rucker, Ala., said at the Aviation Association of America’s Mission Solutions Summit Friday.
Gayler said that since Congress required the Army to consider the FVL program as a joint program to include the Marine Corps and the Air Force, the need to be joint is driving the decision on which type of helicopter will be built first. The Army is still leading the effort.
The Army’s acquisition approach divides up the type of helicopters to be built as a family of helicopters to replace the service’s current fleet into five “capability sets.” The first set is the lightest variant while the fifth is the heaviest. Capability set 3 refers to the medium-lift variant.
Because the Marines and Air Force are more interested in a medium-lift, the Army has decided to focus on that weight class for the first helicopters that will be fielded starting in the early 2030s, according to Gayler.
“Since it’s a DoD joint program, we think the right answer is to go with [capability set 3] with other services, but we obviously will still be very interested in 1 or 2 as well,” Gayler said.
There has been talk about whether the first variant of FVL would be a light reconnaissance-type helicopter in order to fill a gap left open when the Army decided to retire the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopters. The service is temporarily filling the gap by teaming AH-64 Apache Attack helicopters with Shadow unmanned aircraft systems.
But Gayler’s comments seem to put that debate to rest.
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.
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.
The U.S. Army is immersed in testing with two industry teams contracted to develop and build a fuel-efficient, high-speed, next-generation medium-lift helicopter to enter service by 2030.
The service’s Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator, or JMR TD, program awarded development deals to Bell Helicopter-Textron and Sikorsky-Boeing teams to build demonstrator aircraft by 2017 to help inform the development of a new medium-class helicopter.
“These teams will build technology demonstration aircraft with flight tests starting in 2017,” an Army statement said.
Textron Inc.’s Bell Helicopter is building a tilt-rotor aircraft called the Bell V-280 Valor – and the Sikorsky-Boeing team is working on early testing of its SB> 1 Defiant coaxial rotor-blade design.
Planned mission sets for the JMR include cargo, utility, armed scout, attack, humanitarian assistance, medical evacuation, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, land/sea search and rescue, special warfare support, vertical replenishment, airborne mine countermeasures, and others, Army officials said.
Although requirements for the aircraft are still being refined, the notional concept is to succeed in building a new aircraft which can reach speeds of 230 knots, carry up to 12 troops, operate in what’s called “high-hot” conditions and achieve a combat radius of 424 kilometers.
A key intent of the program is to develop a fuel-efficient aircraft which can reach high-speeds while retaining an ability to hover and maneuver as though it is a traditional helicopter.
A combat radius of 424 kilometers means the aircraft will be engineered with an ability to fly 848 kilometers on a round-trip mission without needing to refuel. Along with calling for increased fuel efficiency, the draft requirements also ask that the aircraft be able to operate at altitudes of 6,000-feet and temperatures of 95-degrees Fahrenheit.
Described as “high-hot” conditions, the decreased air pressure at higher altitudes and hotter atmospheric temperatures typically make it
Bell Helicopter and a Sikorsky/Boeing team will each build flying prototypes for a US Army programme that aims to demonstrate a new generation of high-speed rotorcraft.
The army selected Bell’s V-280 Valor optimum speed tiltrotor and the Sikorsky-Boeing concept for a compound coaxial rotor called the SB-1. Both aircraft are planned to fly for three years starting in fiscal 2017.
The selection means that start-up companies AVX Corp and Karem Aircraft will have to find ways to finance continued development. Other companies, such as Airbus Helicopters, declined to participate in the joint multirole – technology demonstrator (JMR-TD) programme.
The army still plans to hold an open competition in the next decade for the future vertical lift (FVL) programme, which aims to replace all of the army’s helicopters with high-speed rotorcraft.
The JMR-TD winners, however, will receive tens of millions of dollars each from the army to develop and demonstrate their prototype aircraft. The selected companies also have pledged to at least match the government’s investment with internal funding.
For Bell, the V-280 also represents an opportunity to build on the V-22 Osprey programme with what it calls the third-generation of tiltrotor technology, including the original XV-15 prototype first flown in the 1980s.
“We remain focused on providing exceptional capabilities and flexibility in an advanced aircraft with reduced weight, complexity and cost,” Bell says in a statement.
Sikorsky and Boeing, meanwhile, are leveraging the former’s investment in compound, coaxial rotor technology with the SB-1 (pictured below). Sikorsky has already tested and retired the X2 proof-of-concept vehicle, as well as launched the S-97 Raider programme. The SB-1 will further scale up the technology, using Honeywell T55 turbofan engines to power the aircraft for the demonstration.
The army has decided which companies will participate in its JMR TD effort and plans to release details by early September
Two companies are expected to build demonstration aircraft for 2017 flight tests
Details of the first downselect for the US Army's Joint Multi-Role helicopter technology demonstrator (JMR-TD) are slated to be announced in "late August or early September", the army said in a 1 August statement.
Officials plan to unveil their decision alongside the four industry teams involved in the effort to date, according to the statement. Finalists appear to have been chosen from among the contenders, but the army declined to release details until that meeting occurs.
Want to see an advanced helicopter fly faster than 230 knots? Well, don’t get out your binoculars and cameras yet, aircraft-watchers.
What may be the next great leap forward in rotorcraft technology begins a month from now with a baby step. By early August, the Army-run Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator program is to choose which of four industry competitors will be given money to build a proof-of-concept aircraft incorporating new or exotic means of making rotorcraft fly faster and farther. The JMR TD is one part of a larger Future Vertical Lift program whose goals include producing a new medium-lift rotorcraft able to fly faster than 230 knots – a hundred knots or so as fast as most existing military helicopters cruise.
While the JMR TD aircraft are to start flight demonstrations in late 2017, any actual military aircraft they might help spawn will fly no sooner than a decade or more later, and probably 2035.
“We’re not building prototypes,” the Army program manager, Dan Bailey, told a CSIS panel discussion on the project Tuesday. “They’re demonstrator aircraft.”
