The U.S. Army says it has “doubled down” on the speed at which it wants to field the Bell MV-75 — formerly known as the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) — and is working closely with the manufacturer to accelerate development of the new tiltrotor aircraft.
“The secretary and the Chief of Staff of the Army has doubled down on how fast we get this capability in the hands of our operators, and so [Bell] has been working with our program office to accelerate that,” Brigadier General Matt Braman, director of Army Aviation, told media during a briefing at the Paris Air Show.
The initial schedule was for a first flight of the MV-75 in 2026, followed by low-rate initial production beginning in 2028 and a first fielded aircraft in 2030.
“The timeline has changed,” said Ryan Ehinger, SVP MV-75 FLRAA at Bell. “It’s a year to multi-year acceleration.”
The speed increase is across the board.
“On the development side . . . [it’s] accelerating delivery of prototypes into the test program to get more test data more quickly,” said Ehinger. “It’s also on the production side, accelerating the timeline to deliver the first production aircraft, and then also accelerating the production rate — the ramp rate.”
Ehinger said there is “a lot of great senior leader support” for acceleration.
“How do we do that? In part, it’s kind of relooking at how we execute the program — we do some things in parallel that might have been more serial,” he said. “We’re ongoing in those discussions and there’s more to come on that.”
He said an enabler behind a lot of the momentum was the work during the tech demonstrator effort, with digital engineering allowing high levels of real-time collaboration throughout the design process.
“That’s giving both sides a lot of confidence in accelerating the program and having a good understanding of where we are from a requirement standpoint,” said Ehinger.
The program achieved “Milestone B” approval last summer, clearing the way for an order of six prototypes.
That approval also marked the program’s transition into engineering and manufacturing development, with Bell expecting to wrap up “the vast majority” of the engineering work this summer.
A 3D engineering environment is being created at the same time, allowing the program team to look at how maintainable and sustainable the aircraft is in the digital space.
“Again, [that’s] giving us confidence that when we build the first set of aircraft, it will be a reliable and sustainable platform for decades to come,” said Ehinger.
Manufacturing work is being undertaken in parallel — rather than waiting for the engineering side to finish.
“Bell has really been developing manufacturing processes since the V-280 development effort in the late 2010s, and we’ve continued that, and we’ve got a Manufacturing Technology Center where we have continued to do manufacturing risk reduction,” said Ehinger.
At the Army Aviation Association of America conference in Nashville, Tennessee last month, U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff General James Mingus announced the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, would be the first to operate the type.
“There’s a reason the government decided to name the first unit this early,” said BG Braman. “It’s a complete vision for the soldiers from those organizations to be embedded in the process of development. So, you’ll see crew members from the 101st in stages of the game as Ryan’s team builds the aircraft — as observers, [and later] as hands-on experts.”
Training for the type could involve embedding Army pilots with the U.S. Marines, said BG Braman.
“It’s a new capability, [a tiltrotor] is not something the Army has flown before, so we’re in talks with the Marine Corps already to embed Army pilots to qualify them . . . [get] that tiltrotor experience [and] bring them back to train our first aviators. That’s not just pilots, it’s crew members [too], and so the Marine Corps is very excited about the opportunity as well.”
In terms of potential future overseas sales for Bell, Ehinger said there is “a lot of interest and demand for a capability that goes twice as fast and twice as far.”
He noted the importance of the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) in acting as an enabler for international partners to acquire and upgrade capabilities independently.
The MV-75 received its official designation last month, having originally been dubbed the V-280 Valor by Bell.
The “MV” stands for multi-mission, vertical takeoff, while “75” commemorates the Army’s founding year — 1775. A common name for the type is said to be under consideration.
From my experiences in Nam I have questions about this a/c. THE UH-60 was an obvious improvement over the UH-1d in every aspect. I do not see that level of improvement in this airframe and plenty of negatives. I doubt it can autorotate. Gunnery arcs can be limited by the large tilt rotors in foward flight or in transitioning. If you lose one engine can you lift and leave, or are you stuck. Complexity for operations and maint/repair? Dual logistics and training for pilots and crews; or for parts as UH60s will still be in service for a substantial time. There are probably others as well. There is a nasty tendency in military development projects where the development team gets caught up in pushing the team goal of success instead of the true goal of producing an effective warfihhting product. Maybe there should be an independent evaluation by an outside the service entity prior to production. The M10 Booker and the new combat rifle is an example of the team losing sight of the real goal and ultimately resulting in program failure.