Sikorsky S-97 Raider has First Flight

The Sikorsky S-97 Raider hit an important milestone Friday with the successful first flight of its experimental rotorcraft.

The S-97, with two pilots, took off at the company's West Palm Beach, Fla., facility about 7 a.m. and performed all of its proscribed movements over roughly an hour. The flight test took on the basics — three take-offs and landings, and all cardinal movements at 10 knots — before more advanced tests over the year.

"This was, we feel, a really spectacular day for Sikorsky and aviation in general," said Mark Miller, Sikorsky's vice president for research and engineering. "It's not every day you have a first flight, and when you add on top of that a very differentiated, new and compelling product like the S-97 Raider, it makes it even more special.

"We're very excited, it was everything we wanted it to be and more, and it's the start of a new generation of helicopters and capabilities that we're really excited about," Miller said.

With the platform, Sikorsky officials said the company was firmly planting its flag for the Army's future vertical lift - light concept and armed aerial scout requirement. The S-97 was envisioned at one point as a contender replacement for the US Army's OH-58 Kiowa Scout, but the Army changed plans and scuttled the armed aerial scout for budgetary reasons, using the AH-64 Apache on an interim basis.

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breaking my rules today...

Senate Armed Services Committee Funds Deep Strike UCLASS Prototypes, Further X-47b Testing

The Senate Armed Services Committee — concerned with the Navy’s direction for its planned unmanned carrier aircraft program — wants the Pentagon to oversee development of two new carrier capable prototype unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and restart testing of the service’s two Northrop Grumman X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration (UCAS-D) in a combined $725 million effort, according to a summary of the SASC’s markup of the Fiscal Year 2016 defense authorization bill released Thursday evening.

The SASC bill reflects ongoing sentiments from legislators in both the House and Senate that oppose the Navy’s development of the Unmanned Carrier Launched Strike and Surveillance (UCLASS) that would have limited ability to extend the lethal range of U.S. carrier air wings into defended enemy airspace and act primarily as an information, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platform for the carrier strike group.

In a March letter, SASC chairman Sen. John McCain told Secretary of Defense Ash Carter “developing a new carrier-based unmanned aircraft that is primarily an ISR platform and unable to operate effectively in medium- to high –level threat environments would be operationally and strategically misguided.”

According to the summary, “the bill includes $375.0 million for competitive prototyping of at least two follow-on air systems that move toward a UCLASS program capable of long-range strike in a contested environment.”

Measures in the bill would allow the Navy to continue developing its own self-directed version of UCLASS — using $134.7 million in excess development funds obligated in 2015. Development of the UCLASS air-segment has been paused due to an ongoing Pentagon wide UAV strategic program review (SPR, pronounced spear) inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and overseen by Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work.

The additional testing and prototyping authority proposed in the SASC bill would give (OSD) more control in shaping UCLASS into a more lethal strike platform in line with the original strategic vision for carrier UAVs, outlined in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, USNI News understands.

The summary said the bill “expresses concern that the Navy’s current requirements for the UCLASS program place disproportionate emphasis on unrefueled endurance to provide organic ISR support to the carrier strike group. The bill recognizes the potential of integrating unmanned combat aircraft in the carrier air wing.”

In parallel to the prototyping effort, the SASC bill gives OSD $350 million “to continue technology maturation and risk reduction with the existing UCAS-D vehicles that will benefit UCLASS and other unmanned aerial systems programs,” read the summary.

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Stealth, Hypersonics and Prototyping! Oh My! A Glimpse at the Thoughts Behind USAF 6th Generation Fighter Development

The U.S. Air Force is launching a new air-supremacy effort designed to identify and develop next-generation technologies to maintain America’s air dominance through 2030 at the same time the future of stealth is being questioned.

The service has stood up teams to experiment and conduct technology demonstrations to identify innovations that will guide the service and its platforms into future in which the Air Force expects to face more threats from advanced militaries like China or North Korea, Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, military deputy for Air Force acquisition, told Military​.com.

“We are going to be facing adversaries that are as modern as we are if not more so. This provides us the opportunity to leverage the entire world market of technology development through our collaborative activity with our allies,” she said.

The effort, which includes work with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, is looking at a wide range of future applications including hypersonics, stealth, advanced sensors, cyber technologies, drones, space systems and directed energy weapons, Pawlikowski said.

“We’re taking a more enterprising look at understanding and exploring the capabilities we are going to need in the future,” she said. “It is not just looking at a next-generation fighter but looking at these issues in the context of leveraging all of the capabilities that can accomplish that.”

Overall, the new Air Force initiative plans to use a lot of modeling and simulations to assess and verify the validity of new or emerging technologies, Pawlikowski said.

When it comes to hypersonic flight, Pawlikowski emphasized that the service will not only explore hypersonic weapons but also hypersonic aircraft designed to carry and deliver the weapons.

In addition, Pawlikowski said the effort will look to defeat the rapidly improving air defense systems. Many experts and analysts have made the point that stealth or low-observable technologies are less effective as faster computers processors, sensors and radar can jump between multiple frequencies and help locate stealth aircraft at increasingly longer distances.

Pawlikowski said stealth technologies will continue to evolve as a way to meet these emerging threats from more advanced air-defense systems. She did not specifically reference the Air Force’s new Long Rang Strike Bomber, or LRS-B, slated to enter service in the 2020’s – but she did say stealth applications are evolving far beyond their original or initial configurations.

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China's Getting Faster at Producing its J-20 Stealth Fighter Prototypes

The first prototype for China’s J-20 stealth fighter appeared in blurry photos in December 2010. Almost exactly four years later, the sixth J-20 has taken flight, just three weeks after the fifth.

Beijing is building J-20s at an accelerating rate. And with six of the huge, twin-engine planes in the air for testing, China is well on its way to finalizing the J-20’s design—and getting the new fighter ready for front-line service.

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Sikorsky Delays First Flight of S-97 Raider to 2015

Sikorsky has chosen prudence over spectacle and delayed the first flight of its S-97 Raider prototype until 2015.

The company, which has invested more than $150 million of internal funding to develop the coaxial rigid-rotor vertical-lift platform, originally planned for it to fly before then end of 2014, but has yet to begin ground testing in preparation for the aircraft’s maiden flight.

Doug Shidler, who headed the Raider project before taking the helm of the company’s joint multi-role development effort, tells Flightglobal there is no particular issues holding the programme back.

“We are going through several lab ground tests right now and we are planning to get into aircraft ground run here in the next couple of weeks,” he says. “As with any development program and first-of-type, there are discoveries. We haven’t had too much discovery, nothing that is insurmountable. We’re making some really good progress in getting the aircraft set for doing its ground runs.”

Raider uses coaxial rotors for vertical lift and a tail propeller for forward thrust. The combination allows for flight characteristics that are physically impossible for existing rotorcraft designs. There is no programme of record within the US military for the aircraft, though the US Army has been monitoring the development effort as it looks to eventually replace its existing, and aging, helicopter fleet.

A transmission system testbed is being built in parallel with the Raider, of which there will be two flying prototypes. The first is designed specifically for the flight test phase. The second will be a demonstration aircraft that will travel and be flown for prospective customers.

The fuselage for Raider II is complete and the remaining parts have been manufactured and delivered. Construction of the second aircraft will begin in early 2015, he says.

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Pentagon Increasing Budget for Prototyping, Especially for Space and Cyber

The Pentagon official who oversees the defense industrial base told Wall Street investors this morning that the upcoming defense budget will include funding for weapons prototypes. And Elena Broitman, deputy assistant defense secretary for manufacturing and industrial base policy (DASD industrial base to most Pentagon wonks), cautioned that the absence of lawmakers with military experience and the public’s “war weariness” may emperil passage of robust defense budgets.

Broitman, told the annual Cowen aerospace and defense conference here that a recent meeting of the Deputies Management Action Group (the deputy defense secretary’s strategic group that makes the big budget decisions) approved moving money from large programs to several smaller prototyping efforts.

“We are doubling down on prototype programs,” Broitman told the audience of roughly 175 aerospace industry investors. Where did the money come from for this effort? “We need to put money from some big programs to smaller programs or we we’re going to have some holes,” she said after describing the top-level decision to put money into prototypes. She wouldn’t describe the specific winners and losers because of the impending release (March 4) of the defense budget. But she also noted that space and cyber security are “major, major concerns.” It wasn’t entirely clear if she was speaking broadly of the budget at that point or about prototyping.

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