Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. James McConville speaks during the Eisenhower Luncheon at AUSA 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022. (Carol Guzy for AUSA)
AUSA 2022 — Army officials spent this year predicting that a decision on the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft could come in September, and then changed that to October. Industry speculation widely expected an announcement to come by the end of the month. But today, the Army’s top officer threw cold water on the excitement, hinting that the decision could continue to slide by several months.
“Within the next few months, we’ll downselect for the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft,” Gen. James McConville, the chief of staff of the Army, said during a speech during the annual Association of the United States Army conference.
The FLRAA is among the Army’s top 35 modernization priority programs, under the service’s future vertical lift portfolio. The future helicopter is set to replace the Army’s decades-old Black Hawk.
Bell Textron and Lockheed Martin Sikorsky are competing for the FLRAA contract, managed by the Army’s Program Executive Office for Aviation and the Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team. Bell is offering the Army a tiltrotor aircraft called the V-280 Valor, while the Sikorsky is offering the Defiant X with coaxial rotors.
Earlier in the day, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth reportedly said at AUSA about the FLRAA decision that “I think it will be a little more time.”
The comments from the two senior leaders bring a new cloud of uncertainty over the FLRAA decision. Other Army leaders at the show have also avoided providing any insight into the apparent delay, or when the award will come.
Speaking at a media roundtable at the show yesterday, Maj. Gen. Walter Rugen, director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team, declined to get into the reason for the wait, saying “I’m not going to get into that.”
Rodney Davis, acting deputy program executive officer for aviation, told reporters during the roundtable that the Army wouldn’t provide specific dates.
“We are in the quiet period for FLRAA. We’re working through a very event driven but rigorous process to get to that decision,” Davis said at the roundtable. “We’re not ready to release that today. But we are working through that. We expect that we’ll have a good decision in relatively short order. We’re not talking about exact dates.”
