FVL: Sikorsky Shows Off S-97 Scout Chopper For Army

WASHINGTON: This week, Sikorsky’s S-97 Raider made its first visit to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, the home to three key organizations that’ll decide FARA’s fate. Those are Army Futures Command’s Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team (FVL CFT), which handles requirements and R&D; Program Executive Office (PEO) Aviation, which will run the formal acquisition program of record; and Army Aviation & Missile Command (AMCOM), which will support the aircraft once fielded.

Sikorsky, part of Lockheed Martin, built and operates the S-97 on its own dime, rather than as part of any federally funded program, so getting permission to fly it at a government site is not a simple exercise.

Sikorsky’s arch-rival is Bell, which made the OH-58 Kiowa scout that FARA is meant to replace. Both companies are under Army contracts to produce FARA prototypes and fly them by 2023. Sikorsky’s will be the Raider-X, a larger and upgraded version of their S-97; both belong to the X-2 family of so-called compound helicopters, which use twin main rotors and a pusher propeller to achieve speed and range unreachable with conventional single-main-rotor designs. Bell’s offering is the Bell 360 Invictus, a single-main rotor helicopter that uses streamlining and small wings to reach the Army’s desired speeds.

But the Bell 360 is an all-new design that doesn’t physically exist yet: There’s no proto-prototype actually flying, the way Sikorsky has the S-97. Not only does Raider give Sikorsky a physical product to show off, it also gives them real-life flight test data to inform their upgraded Raider-X design. Those two advantages appear to give Sikorsky a leg up in the FARA competition, although they’re by no means decisive.

On the flip side, while Sikorsky has the edge for the scout aircraft, Bell is arguably leading for the Future Vertical Lift transport, the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft meant to replace the Reagan-era UH-60 Black Hawk. True, in contrast to the situation with FARA, both companies have proto-prototypes of FLRAA flying: the Bell V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor descended from the famous V-22 Osprey, and the Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 Defiant, another X2-style compound helicopter like Raider. But Bell’s V-280 has been flying for a year longer, accumulating a lot more real-world data. (Both companies have done thousands of hours of ground tests, component tests, and simulations).

The Army has said that Defiant is catching up, however, and the Sikorsky-Boeing team unveiled their upgraded Defiant-X design in January.

It sounds like Sikorsky hopes to bring Defiant to Redstone sometime as well. ““This is the first of what we believe will be many times our X2 Future Vertical Lift aircraft will fly at Redstone,” Sikorsky President Paul Lemmo said in a statement.

This week’s flight demonstrations occurred on April 13 and 15.

 

Update: The original version of this article omitted mention of PEO-Aviation, which is also based in Huntsville.