AUSA 2024 — Bell Textron will produce fuselages for the Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft in house, having made the decision to take the work away from Spirit AeroSystems following the announcement of its proposed acquisition by Boeing, Bell and Spirit confirmed to Breaking Defense.
Army acquisition executive Doug Bush said the service does not anticipate any risk to the FLRAA program resulting from Bell’s pivot away from Spirit as the fuselage maker.
“We’re ahead of that problem. It’s already been worked out,” he told Breaking Defense in an interview ahead of the Association of the US Army conference in Washington this week.
The transfer of work on the Army’s highest priority aviation program is the direct result of Bell’s concerns that financial and operational instability at Boeing, which is set to acquire Spirit in mid-2025, could have an adverse impact on the FLRAA program.
“Bell has full responsibility for the fuselage scope of work, as we do with many of our product lines,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Breaking Defense. “Bell’s Amarillo facility remains the final assembly site for the FLRAA aircraft.”
Bell declined to provide further details on the move, including on timing of the transition.
“Spirit and Bell coordinated on an agreement to transition full responsibility for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft fuselage to Bell,” Spirit AeroSystems spokesman Joe Buccino said.
Boeing declined to comment.
A source with knowledge of the program said that Spirit’s participation on the program is set to wrap up by the end of 2024, with the company poised to complete its final shipment of government property back to Bell by the end of the month.
Asked about the decision to pull work from Spirit AeroSystems, Frank Lazzara, Bell’s director of FLRAA sales and strategy, told Breaking Defense that Bell wanted to ensure it could control its destiny as it finalizes the FLRAA design and begins producing prototypes.
“Execution is everything. I’ve said that a few times. Right now, it’s about controlling the things that really need to be under our control,” he said in an interview Monday morning. “Now how that looks over the long term, we’ll see. But again, I think we’re in a good place for executing the obligation in front of us.”
Lazzara acknowledged that taking on the additional workshare would necessitate “some level of build up of that team, and noted that Bell is still working through the finer details of move, including where it will build the fuselages. However, he said that the company is confident it will be able to meet its schedule requirements despite the changes.
Industry sources have told Breaking Defense that several defense primes currently working with Spirit had levied concerns about the proposed acquisition by Boeing, which is currently embroiled in a production and safety crisis and taking cost cutting measures due to an ongoing strike at its Seattle-area aircraft plants.
In July, sources told Breaking Defense that Bell had decided to oust Spirit AeroSystems as the provider of FLRAA’s composite-skinned aluminum fuselage after Boeing completes its $8.3 billion acquisition of Spirit, a major fuselage supplier on all Boeing commercial jetliners that was originally part of the company until being spun off in 2005.
The Army announced in August that the FLRAA program had entered into its engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase after receiving Milestone B approval. The decision — made after a successful preliminary design review in April and a June meeting of the Army Systems Acquisition Review Council — allows the Army to exercise its first contract option for six FLRAA prototypes and moves Bell forward into the detailed design of the aircraft.
The service currently plans for the first FLRAA aircraft to fly in 2026, the Army said in an August release. Low rate initial production is scheduled to start in 2028, followed by the fielding of the first batch of aircraft in 2030.
Bell beat out a team of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky subsidiary to win the FLRAA contract in 2022. At the time, Army officials said the contract was worth $1.3 billion but could end up being in the range of $70 billion if contract options and export opportunities emerge.
Boeing’s acquisition of Spirit would have put Bell back in the position of working with its partner on the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor program. Boeing makes the fuselages for the Osprey under a 50-50 joint venture with Bell, which is responsible for wings, tail structure and rotors.
UPDATED on 10/14/24 at 3:11 pm ET with an interview with Bell’s FLRAA sales director.
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