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.
Newly-appointed Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik and Pakistani counterpart Khawaja Muhammad Asif met Friday in Islamabad to discuss bilateral defense cooperation.
"One of the most important issues between [the two countries] is a deal for T129 attack helicopters," Isik said at a joint press conference held after the meeting.
The deal for the sale of the T129s -- a multi-role attack helicopter co-developed by Turkish Aerospace Industries -- will "further enhance our bilateral cooperation in the defense industry," Isik asserted.
Special Operations Command will test a laser weapon on an Apache helicopter this summer, said one official May 26.
SOCOM's program executive office rotary wing is working alongside the Army’s project office for Apache Attack Helicopters to conduct a feasibility test this summer, said Col. John Vannoy, program manager for rotary wing.
“There is absolutely a niche I believe for use of directed energy weapons,” he said during a briefing at the annual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association. “The lens we are looking at this through right now is: ‘Is it feasible to do this?’ We’re not at the point where we’ve laid out a business case to advance it.”
The office envisions using a laser weapon to destroy vehicles or generators versus sending in a missile that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.
Vannoy’s office and the Army's Apache office have entered into a cooperative research and development agreement with Raytheon to put a podded laser on the aircraft, he said.
“We really want to understand the environment on the wing, the beam quality we can get off the wing and the ability to beam steer and keep power on a target,” he said.
Environmental factors such as dust could affect beam quality. In addition, the vibrations on an Apache’s wing could affect steering, he said.
Vannoy did not disclose a specific timeframe for the test or when results would be made public. “Most of that will be internal quite frankly,” he said.
The effort is still in its infancy, he said. “I wouldn’t say that we’re at the tipping point and you’re going to see a Star Wars like effect or a Death Star laser hanging off the side of a rotary wing aircraft,” he said.
A directed energy weapon could also be mounted on an MH-60 Black Hawk, he said.
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.
The deputy commander of US Pacific Command says the Army must field next-generation aircraft with greater range, speed and survivability than is achievable with today’s helicopter inventory.
Lt Gen Tony Crutchfield says the vast distances inherent in the Pacific theatre, as well as the proliferation of anti-aircraft weaponry, are challenging the current generation of army rotorcraft, namely the AH-6 Little Bird, UH-60 Black Hawk, AH-64 Apache and CH-47 Chinook, which were all adopted in the last century.
“I firmly believe the only way we will close the gap with the problems facing us today is with Future Vertical Lift (FVL),” he says, referring to the army-led acquisition programme that will introduce a new family of aircraft with roughly double the range and speed of today’s models.
“We must have Future Vertical Lift,” he continues, speaking at an Army Aviation Association of America conference in Atlanta, Georgia on 30 April. “It is the only way we will be successful in the PACOM environment with the distances. That range and that speed and that survivability are critical to army aviation to be effective in this fight.”
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.
AVX Aircraft of Benbrook, Texas has responded to the US Army’s request for information on the smallest of five planned Future Vertical Lift (FVL) capability sets with two 7.5t (16,700lb) winged coaxial compound helicopter configurations that the company’s chief executive describes as vertical takeoff fighter aircraft for light reconnaissance, attack, assault and medical evacuation missions.
The baseline swept-wing, 13.4m (44ft) diametre rotor concept would be powered by two 3,000shp Improved Turbine Technology Programme (ITEP) engines and is designed to meet a demanding set of core requirements proposed by the US Army in its “Capability Set 1” RFI document. The requirements that emerged for that next-generation rotorcraft category required a more robust design than the 4.5t (10,000lb) light single that AVX discussed with the Army back in January for Capability Set 1 (CS1), prior to the 18 February RFI release.
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.
A Russian Mi-28 attack helicopter crashed in Syria on April 12. The two crew died.
The gunship is the third aircraft the Russian military has lost in its six-month-old intervention in Syria on behalf of the regime of Pres. Bashar Al Assad.
The Mi-28 was not shot down, multiple media outlets reported, citing the Russian defense ministry.
The pursuit of personal flight took a promising, and kind of wacky, step forward today with the electric 18-rotor Volocopter lifting somebody into the air for the very first time. The maiden manned flight went off without a hitch, with the makers intent on using the emission-free aircraft as flying taxis a little further down the road.
The US Army’s requirement for a next-generation armed scout platform to replace the acclaimed Bell OH-58 Kiowa has been around since the Light Helicopter Experimental (LHX) programme of the 1980s.
Now, as the remaining Kiowas are being scrapped, stored or sold without a dedicated, manned replacement, the army could decide this year whether to launch another light attack/reconnaissance rotorcraft development effort under the banner of Future Vertical Lift (FVL).
The assumed plan has been that the army would move first on “FVL Medium” as a natural follow-on to the 13,600kg (30,000lb)-class technology demonstrator showdown between the Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant and Bell Helicopter V-280 Valor prototypes.
But a “Capability Set 1” request for information (RFI) released last month and seeking rotorcraft options for the “light attack/reconnaissance role”, has long-time FVL players, particularly Sikorsky, pushing rotorcraft like the S-97 Raider, first flown in May. Bell, Boeing, AVX, Karem and MD Helicopters have also shown interest, but have not shown their hands.
A convertiplane developed by the Russian Helicopters Group has performed its first flight, the company’s representatives told TASS at the rotocraft maker’s exhibition stand at the Singapore Airshow 2016 on Wednesday.
"The works on developing the unique machine started in 2015. Over that time, we have achieved considerable results and have already started the first state of flight tests," the representatives quoted Alexander Okhonko, the CEO of VR-Technologies, a subsidiary of Russian Helicopters Group, as saying.
The project is being implemented as part of the Speed program in cooperation with the company Aerob, a resident of the space cluster at Russia’s Skolkovo hi-tech hub outside Moscow.
The project aims at developing a family of multi-purpose rotocraft, Russian Helicopters said.
The convertiplane is equipped with a hybrid power plant expected to allow it to develop a speed of up to 500 km/hr.
Today only the consortium of US companies Bell Helicopter and Boeing is serially producing convertiplanes, in particular, the MV-22 Osprey. These machines are delivered to the US Marine Corps and the Air Force, as well as to Japan, which has ordered five such aircraft.
The US Army has confirmed its pursuit of a light reconnaissance helicopter that will assume the role left vacant by the retirement of the Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior.
Army military deputy for acquisition, technology and logistics Lt Gen Michael Williamson suggested the army might move quicker on its Future Vertical Lift-Light (FVL-Light) programme because it might be more achievable in the near term.
“I think what you’ll find is there’s still a requirement for us to have a light reconnaissance helicopter, so as we looked at the dollars that are available and the timing to get to a platform, we saw the light helicopter probably gave us the most in terms of schedule,” Williamson said at a conference on US fiscal year 2017 defence programmes in Washington DC on 10 March.
Kamov is working on a new naval helicopter for the Russian Navy and the rotor-craft has been code named “Minoga.”
It will still retain the coaxial rotors configuration and the gross weight is less than 12,000 kg. The top speed will be around 170 knots.
There’s been some breathless coverage of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency experiment with what look like mechanical insect legs to replace the usual wheels or skids helicopters land on. One article called the Adaptive Landing Gear nothing short of “incredible.” The video DARPA publicized is certainly fun to watch (see above), but there’s a lot less utility there than meets the eye — at least for now.
“The only thing that I can see it would have an advantage over what we have in a skid is on a slope,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, who won the Medal of Honor and a ton of other decorations for saving more than 5,000 wounded in more than 2,500 combat missions as a rescue helicopter pilot in Vietnam. The Encyclopedia of the Viet Nam War calls him the conflict’s top helicopter pilot. “Looks like a big grasshopper,” Brady said of the leg-like landing gear, developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology on a roughly $1 million DARPA grant.
Another Vietnam vet, retired Army Lt. Col. Bob Greene, who logged 1,900 combat hours flying South Vietnamese and U.S. troops into action in UH-1 Hueys, said the idea is “interesting” but that’s about all. “I love DARPA,” Greene said, “but this is probably not one of their better things.”
The goal is to make it possible to land on slopes or uneven or rocky terrain of the sort combat helicopter pilots often confront and end up hovering over instead of landing on or to put a bird down safely on a rolling ship deck. DARPA program manager Ashish Bagai explained in a briefing to the American Helicopter Society International’s yearly conference last May that, “The feet have tactile feedback; they have pressure feedback. Each foot is individually operated. When you encounter an obstruction, the foot that first contacts the obstruction allows the leg to bend until everything else has contacted terra firma.”
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).
