Bell-Boeing Joint Project Office, Amarillo, Texas, is being awarded a $544,668,978 modification to the previously awarded fixed-price-incentive-firm target, Lot 17-21 multi-year contract (N00019-12-C-2001). This modification provides for the long lead production materials and the manufacture and delivery of four MV-22 tilt rotor aircraft pursuant to the variation in quantity clause in support of the government of Japan; as well as incorporation of an engineering change proposal for the standby flight display. Work will be performed in Fort Worth, Texas (24.6 percent); Ridley Park, Pennsylvania (19.2 percent); Amarillo, Texas (10.4 percent); Dallas, Texas (4.3 percent); East Aurora, New York (2.5 percent); Park City, Utah (1.7 percent); El Segundo, California (1.3 percent); Endicott, New York (1 percent); Ontario, Canada (0.9 percent); Tempe, Arizona (0.8 percent); Corinth, Texas (0.8 percent); Rome, New York (0.7 percent); Torrance, California (0.7 percent); Luton, United Kingdom (0.6 percent); Los Angeles, California (0.6 percent); Cobham, United Kingdom (0.6 percent); Irvine, California (0.6 percent); San Diego, California (0.5 percent); Yakima, Washington (0.5 percent); Brea, California (0.5 percent); Rockmart, Georgia (0.5 percent); Albuquerque, New Mexico (0.4 percent); Whitehall, Michigan (0.4 percent); Wolverhampton, United Kingdom (0.4 percent); Tucson, Arizona (0.4 percent); Erie, Pennsylvania (0.3 percent); Vergennes, Vermont (0.3 percent); Kilgore, Texas (0.3 percent); Shelby, North Carolina (0.3 percent); Avon, Ohio (0.2 percent); Santa Clarita, California (0.2 percent); Garden City, New York (0.2 percent); El Cajon, California (0.2 percent); Sylmar, California (0.2 percent); Westbury, New York (0.1 percent); and various other locations inside and outside the U.S. (22.8 percent), and is expected to be completed in May 2020. Foreign military sales funds in the amount of $302,913,946 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland, is the contracting activity.
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.
The decline in V-22 Osprey orders from the U.S. military in coming years means the tiltrotor transport’s manufacturers are likely to spend a lot of time wooing foreign military officers at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition May 16-18 at National Harbor, Md. – especially Britain’s new First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Philip Jones.
Representatives from Bell Helicopter and Boeing Co., which make the V-22 in a 50-50 partnership, will have a V-22 fuselage on display at the Navy League conference. They surely would like to show Sir Philip, who is expected to attend, why they think the Royal Navy needs the new CMV-22B variant Osprey the U.S. Navy is buying for Carrier Onboard Delivery (COD) – hauling cargo and passengers to and from aircraft carriers at sea.
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.
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.
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.
After years of hesitation, the Navy finally decided last year to buy 44 CMV-22B variant Ospreys to replace its C-2A Greyhound airplanes in Carrier Onboard Delivery (COD) missions. But the way the Navy handled the V-22 in this year’s budget calls into question how firm its commitment to buying that many Ospreys really is. The Navy has so many competing, expensive and higher priorities that some Osprey partisans wonder if the money will be there for all those aircraft in the end even if, as expected, the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) and Osprey makers Bell Helicopter and Boeing Co. negotiate a new multiyear contract – a bulk purchase at lower unit prices. In other words, the poverty penalty could come into play.
“The stress on the budget is real, it’s acute,” said one retired Marine general. “We don’t know right now how many airplanes the Department of the Navy is going to buy. If the multi-year falls apart, it could be less.”
Under an informal rule set by Congress, multiyear contracts are required to provide at least a 10 percent saving over annual contracts. Under the final year of the program’s second multiyear contract, the Marine Corps requested 16 Ospreys in fiscal 2017 at a “flyaway” price of $74.7 million apiece. Future projections released with this year’s budget show that price rising to $94.7 million per Osprey if they don’t get a new multiyear.
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.
Naval Air Systems Command awarded the Bell-Boeing Joint Project Office $151 million to begin engineering the Navy variant of the V-22 Osprey, which the service will use as a carrier onboard delivery plane.
The funding, adding onto an existing contract with Bell-Boeing, covers non-recurring engineering costs to add extended range, high frequency beyond line-of-sight radio and a public address system to the baseline MV-22 used by the Marine Corps. The Navy announced in February that its variant would be called the CMV-22B, a designation that combines the cargo-carrying nature of the Air Force’s CV-22 and the multimission and special forces-capable nature of the Marines’ MV-22.
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.
Personal electric VTOL (vertical take off and landing) commuting may not be far off, thanks to accelerating improvements in battery technology. Joby Aviation has put forward an incredible two-seater plane concept that uses 12 tilting electric propellers to provide multirotor-style balanced VTOL capabilities. Once it reaches cruising speeds, these rotors fold away into aerodynamic bullet shapes, and the aircraft can reach speeds of up to 200 mph (322 km/h) and ranges of up to 200 miles using four additional cruise-optimized props on the backs of the wings and tail fins.
The Spanish Navy (Armada Española) has claimed to be the first non-US naval service to embark a squadron of the US Marine Corps' (USMC's) Bell Boeing MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft on board one of its ships. The embarkation took place during Exercise 'Trident Juncture 2015' that started in early October 2015 and jointly hosted by Spain, Portugal and Italy.
The four Osprey transports, which combine the vertical lift-off capability of a helicopter with the higher speed and payload flight of a turbo-prop aircraft, are stationed at the Morón de la Frontera Air Base in southern Spain.
For 'Trident Juncture 2015' the aircraft were embarked with six of the Armada's AV-8B Harrier and an AB-212 helicopter from the 27,000-tonne landing helicopter dock (LHD) Juan Carlos I .
"This event is a historic achievement both for the Marines and the Armada Española," said the Spanish Navy. "Never before has an American [Osprey] squadron formed part of an air unit embarked on a ship that does not belong to the US Navy."
The U.S. Navy hopes to combine U.S. Navy orders and potential foreign demand for the V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft built by Boeing Co and Textron's Bell Helicopter in a third five-year agreement.
Marine Corps Colonel Dan Robinson, who runs the programme for the Navy, said on Tuesday the goal was to secure commitments from potential foreign buyers by June 2016 in order to get congressional approval for a multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal that could cut the plane's cost by 10 percent.
He said three or four countries had expressed strong interest in the aircraft, and estimated that the United States could sell 20 to 24 V-22 Ospreys to foreign countries in the near term.
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 United Arab Emirates has selected the AW609 design from AgustaWestland to fulfill its requirement for a tiltrotor search and rescue aircraft, the Armed Forces' Joint Aviation Command announced Tuesday.
However, a senior Boeing official told Defense News late Tuesday that the agreement should have no impact on ongoing discussions with the UAE about Bell Boeing’s V-22 design, as the company is targeting a different mission for the Osprey.
The selection of the AW609 gives a launch customer for the search and rescue design of the aircraft.
Delivery of the first three aircraft is expected to start in the "2019 timeframe," AgustaWestland said in a news release, while the UAE holds options on three more aircraft. The systems will be operated by the UAE's Joint Aviation Command.
An AgustaWestland AW609 prototype has crashed near Santhià , in northwestern Italy, killing two test pilots on Oct. 30.
The tilt-rotor aircraft had taken off from Agusta’s airfield at Vergiate and the cause of the crash is still unknown.
According to the first reports the aircraft was in fire before it crashed into the ground.
Spirit AeroSystems rolled out the first fuselage for the Bell Helicopter V-280 tiltrotor demonstrator on 22 September, revealing much about how the team hopes to make tiltrotor technology affordable for widespread military application.
The V-280 features several design innovations as a generational improvement on the tiltrotor technology used with the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, including a potential breakthrough with a straight wing that replaces the dihedral and swept swing on the V-22.
But Bell chief executive John Garrison tells Flightglobal in an interview that the most critical breakthrough on the V-280 is also manufacturing process intended to dramatically lower the price point and operating cost of tiltrotor technology.
