Bell believes it can replicate the success Sikorsky has had with the UH-60 Black Hawk in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) with the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA).
The company has returned to the Farnborough International Airshow with the full-scale mockup of the tiltrotor’s technology demonstrator, and executives said international interest in the program is high.
“If you look at a Black Hawk as a sort of aircraft for that class, they’re probably a pretty good surrogate for how big the FMS marketplace is,” Scott Donnelly, CEO of Bell’s parent company Texton, told reporters during a media briefing at the event. “There’s thousands of aircraft out there in that class, and I think we’ve we had a ton of countries who have already expressed a lot of interest in this [FLRAA aircraft].”
Touting the “quantum step in speed and range” the aircraft will provide over the Black Hawk, Donnelly said this meant “you don’t necessarily have to have a one-for-one replacement.”
The aircraft — known as the V-280 Valor during its technology demonstrator phase, but now referred to as the Army’s FLRAA aircraft — will also be more affordable than the existing military tiltrotor, the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, he said.
“There were people out there looking at the V-22, but a V-22 is relatively more expensive,” said Donnelly. “I think this is going to be the price point that’s more traditional with where people would expect to be in that kind of utility class of machine, and I think there’ll be huge interest.”
Regarding the U.S. Army’s cancellation of the other high-profile Future Vertical Lift Program — the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) — of which Bell was a finalist, Donnelly said “obviously we weren’t happy,” but pointed out there were some knock-on benefits.
“Part of what we’re seeing is diversion of some of the monies that would have otherwise gone into FARA are now helping to beef up the budget on the FLRAA side,” he said. “I think we felt great about where we were and we’re disappointed after doing that, but the Army’s got to make their calls — and the good news is I think it’s going to help put more focus on the success and funding behind the FLRAA program.”
Bell CEO Lisa Atherton said some of the range of requirements for the FARA platform would likely be moved into the FLRAA program, showcasing the aircraft’s utility.
“Some of the mission sets that the FARA [aircraft] would have done would move into this platform — launched effects being one of those,” she said.
The company is “150 percent focused” on execution of the FLRAA program, she added, and expects the government’s Milestone B decision “any day.”
This will mark the beginning of the engineering and manufacturing development portion of the program as a full program of record.
“That’s where in earnest we are continuing to mature the design into the critical design review phase, and doing a lot more hardware fabrication and testing and development of the prototype test article aircraft,” said Ryan Ehinger, senior vice president and program director, FLRAA.
Discussing the evolution of the FLRAA aircraft from the mock up on display at Farnborough to the aircraft in development today, Ehinger said they look almost identical.
“I think under the under the skin though, what you’d see is the Joint Multi-Role Tech Demonstrator was very much focused on the air vehicle capabilities and demonstrating those,” he said.
“What we tried to show — and what we did show — in the demonstrator program was that we could do everything a Black Hawk could do: deploy fast rope, have low speed agility and we could go faster and further and sling load and everything else. What we didn’t spend as much time demonstrating in that program was the open systems architecture and the digital backbone. And so that’s probably the biggest single difference between the two from a physical standpoint is that open systems architecture and the digital backbone that we’re developing for the FLRAA aircraft — and that’s going quite well.”
Final assembly of the FLRAA aircraft will be performed at Bell’s facility in Amarillo, Texas, which has extensive experience working on the V-22 and H-1 programs.
Superb article praising the FLRAA – certainly interesting.
One note – the Army does not have any V-22s.