The Army’s urgently developing new air-launched drones, long-range missiles, and electronic architecture to go on the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft that Bell and Sikorsky are vying to build.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Enterprise-wide training: the Army’s $3.5B program for multi-service combat readiness
The competition for Warfighter Training and Readiness Solutions will bring together training networks, combat training centers and live ranges across the DoD enterprise.
Awards for Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft designs went to Bell, Boeing, Karem, Sikorsky, and a partnership of AVX and L-3.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) must have enough artificial intelligence to fly unmanned at least part of the time, a secure network to control drones, and combination of speed and range that’s impossible for traditional helicopters.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The Army doesn’t only want much faster aircraft: It wants them to cost the same to build, operate, and maintain as its current helicopters. Otherwise it can’t fit them into an unchanging aviation budget. That’s an awfully high bar.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: The military wants to replace a host of current helicopters with aircraft that not only fly much faster, but can fly without a human pilot. The Army-led Future Vertical Lift program will study whether FVL should be an “Optionally Piloted Vehicle,” capable of accommodating a pair of highly-trained human pilots for complex combat missions or of…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Critics say the Army could end up wasting billions by developing a better engine for its Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk and Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopters even as the joint Future Vertical Lift (FVL) initiative gets underway to replace those aircraft. The critics are wrong, program officials assure us. But the critics still disagree. A new Army…
By Richard Whittle
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…
By Richard Whittle
GA-ASI’s MQ-9B: The right UAV for persistence, power, and performance
When assessing the state of the art of unmanned aerial systems, it’s critical to be very clear about what various aircraft can and can’t do – and could never do.
WASHINGTON: The first Future Vertical Lift Aircraft won’t fly until the 2030s but the Army, Navy, and industry are already at work on software standards. Those include a new “model-based” approach to software architectures that will require a culture change among programmers and defense bureaucrats alike. Why take on so much so early? Because FVL will…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
