AUSA 2025 — Cuts spurred by the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI) have raised questions and caused uncertainty throughout the entirety of the service, and its aviation portfolio, namely the Black Hawk program, has not been spared.
As questions continue to swirl around the fate of the program, the head of the Program Executive Office for Aviation told Breaking Defense that though he’s not positive about how long the Black Hawk UH-60Ms will operate in the US Army, his current focus is on upgrading and maintaining the Sikorsky fleet.
“I can’t speak to the long term future of the Mikes, [a common call sign for the Black Hawk UH-60M fleet], but what I’ll say is that they’re some of our newest, best platforms,” PEO of Aviation Brig. Gen. David Phillips told Breaking Defense in an interview. “What I offer is that we’re continuing to update Black Hawks with the integration of launched effects. That’s especially occurring in parallel with some of our UAS programs that we will bring into the field next summer, part of Project Convergence.”
Questions regarding the fate of the Black Hawk in the Army began circulating after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unleashed the ATI in May. The ATI called for the Army to speed up its production of its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program. When the program was first announced in 2022, the Army selected Bell’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor as the FLRAA aircraft to eventually replace thousands — but not all — of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters in a deal that could soar to $70 billion, as Breaking Defense previously reported.
But last year when service leaders revamped its aviation portfolio and canceled its next generation Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, it said the freed up funding would go in part toward a new UH-60M multi-year deal to carry out production past fiscal 2026. However, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and the service’s Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, told lawmakers in the spring that the contract is no longer a given.
The Army did not respond to a request for comment on whether the contract is still scheduled to be awarded in late 2026. The service has previously said that the next buy of Black Hawks will be its last, Aviation Week reported.
Jay Macklin, director of strategy and business development for Sikorsky Army and Air Force Systems, told reporters recently that the company is tracking the award, known as the multi-year XI, which they expect to be awarded in late 2026 and is for the production of UH-60Ms from 2027 to 2032. The original request for information for the award went out in July 2024, and was for a base order of 100-120 helicopters, with options for another 135-155 to begin in 2027.
Regarding Phillips’ plans for the present, in addition to adding launched effects to the UH-60Ms, the service also plans to upgrade the UH-60M fleet by implementing an open systems architecture for information sharing as well as new “survivability” capabilities thanks to the increased number of sensors on the aircraft. The maintenance of the aircraft also maintains a priority, Phillips said.
“We’re continuing to maintain that modernized, lethal capability in the fleet. That survivability and lethality across our full portfolio is still very important — it’s really about the sustainability of these platforms. Our UH-60 Mikes are some of the greatest aircraft we’ve got, but over time they will continue to get older,” he added. “We’ll have Black Hawks in the fleet likely through the [20]40s and 50s.”
The ambiguity surrounding the future of the Black Hawk fleet raises the possibility of the aircraft eventually becoming an unmanned platform. Sikorsky unveiled its plans to turn one of its older UH-60L models into a Group 5 UAS today, which it is calling the S70 UHawk. The funding for the new UAS, which is undergoing flight testing next year, is derived from internal company research and engineering efforts, Erskine “Ramsey” Bentley, director of strategy and business development for Sikorsky Advanced Programs, told reporters ahead of today’s announcement.
“Basically what we’ve done is we have taken a [UH-60L] model Black Hawk, and using our MATRIX autonomy system, have turned this aircraft into a UAS. Now, one of the unique things about the S70 UAS, or UHawk, as we call it, is we have completely removed the cockpit, the pilot and also the crew chief stations of the aircraft,” Bentley said.
When asked if Sikorsky had plans to do the same for the UH-60M fleets, Igor Cherepinsky, the director of Sikorsky Innovations, said it’s not out of the realm of possibilities.
“It all depends on the economics and price point,” he told reporters last week. “Right now we’re looking at [the UH-60Ls], but who knows”
Phillips didn’t provide any comments on if he could foresee the same fate for the UH-60Ms. However, he said that “the effort has been going on for a while, and I believe that those internally funded efforts are very informative for the requirements for the market of autonomous platforms.”
PHOTOS: AUSA 2025
Gallery
