PENTAGON: A sleek little model sits on the desk of Lt. Gen. Jon “Dog” Davis, Marine deputy commandant for aviation. What is that, we asked? The next tiltrotor Bell Helicopter Textron hopes the Marine Corps will buy. But it’s not the V-280 Valor, the new manned tiltrotor Bell plans to fly next year. It’s an […]
Army aviation’s “top modernization priority program” – at least that’s what they call it – took another baby step forward this week. The service awarded preliminary design review contracts to the two competitors vying to build a better engine to power the service’s vast fleet of Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk and Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopters. […]
Do more with less: streamline workflows, reduce duplication, invest upfront to save long-term.
When the Marine Corps developed the V-22 Osprey in the 1980s, the vision was pretty simple: fly troops ashore in amphibious assaults launched from beyond the range of anti-ship missiles. Now they’re turning the Osprey into a gas station. The Marines clearly envision the tiltrotor as a sort of flying Swiss Army knife. One clear example […]
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.: The United Kingdom is following the U.S. Joint Multirole Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) project with “great interest” and might either get involved at some point or buy future aircraft the effort spawns, says a top British Defence Ministry rotorcraft engineer. “It’s a perfectly feasible outcome,” Bryan Finlay, the senior engineer at the […]
The decline in V-22 Osprey orders from the U.S. military in coming years means the tiltrotor transport’s manufacturers are likely to spend a lot of time wooing foreign military officers at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition May 16-18 at National Harbor, Md. – especially Britain’s new First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Philip Jones. Representatives from Bell Helicopter […]
The future of tilt rotor aviation is taking shape, quite literally, at the Bell Helicopter factory in Fort Worth, where the company attached the wing of its prototype V-280 Valor to the fuselage. Now we can see in real life, not just computer drawings, what one vision for the military’s Future Vertical Lift aircraft will look […]
As threats rapidly evolve, digital engineering, manufacturing capacity and robust supply chains are critical to meeting challenges.
A recent University of Michigan study found that poor families often pay higher prices for necessities because they lack enough cash on hand to make bulk purchases at lower unit prices. This “poverty penalty” could soon apply in defense acquisition. A potential case in point: The V-22 Osprey tiltrotor transport. After years of hesitation, the […]
CORRECTED: 280 knots equals 322 mph, not 245. Spring has sprung and at the Bell Helicopter factory in Amarillo, Texas, it’s mating season, of a sort. If all goes well, by September of next year a bird of a different feather will take flight – the V-280 Valor, a medium-lift tiltrotor transport whose wing and […]
A London Daily Mail report that the V-22 is “the SAS’s deadly new weapon in the war against Islamic State terrorists threatening to bring murder and bloodshed to the streets of Britain” has Pentagon and Osprey fleet insiders giggling and Bell-Boeing executives doing some wishful thinking. The Daily Mail told us that the SAS (Special Air Service) was […]
What could justify the Air Force awarding a sole source contract for helicopters worth close to a billion – that’s a thousand millions – dollars? Pick an answer: Whatever the answer, Air Force Secretary Deborah James and other officials confirmed in House Armed Services subcommittee hearings Thursday that the service’s acquisition arm is studying whether […]
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
CORRECTION: THE ARTICLE WAS WRONG IN SAYING THE OSPREY SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO HOVER ON ONE ENGINE WASHINGTON: Marine Corps leaders have issued a fleetwide order to MV-22 pilots to wave off any landing in a dust cloud they can’t complete within 30 seconds, Breaking Defense has learned, a reaction to a fatal accident in Hawaii on […]
Somebody’s finally doing something tangible about the future of Army aviation. Bell Helicopter subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., has started assembling the composite fuselage for the first prototype V-280 Valor, Bell’s new military tiltrotor. The Valor is sleeker, smaller, and, by design, more Army-friendly than the Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey, which was built to fit […]
WASHINGTON: When is a helicopter not a helicopter? The question arises because Sikorsky Aircraft’s new S-97 Raider got airborne for the first time the other day and company officials all but declared the dawn of a new age in aviation — or at least the birth of a new type of aircraft. “This was, we […]
ARLINGTON: And then there were five. There were already going to be four different aircraft in the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) family, from light to medium to heavy to “ultra.” Now it’s almost certain that the medium FVL will be split into two separate versions: a smaller attack/reconnaissance aircraft and a larger troop-carrying assault craft. […]