“Especially from an X2 standpoint, the largest procurement out there is really NGRC. And that recapitalization of the helicopter fleet in Europe is the largest thing we see today at least in the next five or 10 years,” said Sikorsky boss Rich Benton.
Sikorsky says their Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft design will fly faster, with bigger weapons, than archrival Bell’s. Bell says theirs will be cheaper and more reliable.
As aircraft shrink, threats expand, and technology accelerates, aircraft engines must iterate along with the threats.
Sikorsky and Boeing are saying that their aircraft is taking longer than Bell's because their design is more inventive -- harder, riskier, and more time-consuming, yes, but ultimately better. In particular, while the SB>1 looks like it'll be a little slower than the V-280, going by the companies' projections for top speed, Sikorsky and Boeing say their machine will be much more maneuverable.
AUSA: Lockheed Martin company Sikorsky and teammate Boeing are taking a deliberate approach to building their prototype for the Army-led Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program, the SB>1 Defiant, officials told our contributor Richard Whittle when he visited their booth. Based on Sikorsky’s award-winning X2 technology demonstrator, the Defiant is a compound helicopter with coaxial rotors […]
AUSA: As a rule of thumb, the aerodynamics of rotor blades limit helicopters to top cruising speeds well under 200 mph, but Sikorsky and Boeing are building an aircraft they promise will thumb its nose at that rule. It’s a compound helicopter – two coaxial rotors and a pusher propeller – that they promise will […]
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 […]
Modeling and simulation get an AI upgrade for more realistic training and improved autonomous platforms.
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 […]
In the 1934 film “It Happened One Night,” fictional slime ball “King” Westley shows off by floating to a landing on the lawn of his fiancée’s daddy’s estate in a newfangled autogiro – an airplane with a rotor to enable short take offs and landings. Today, two Defense Department programs are striving to meet the […]
The company that built the first workable helicopter rolled out a (potential) revolution in chopper technology yesterday: Sikorsky’s high-speed S-97 Raider. A year ago, Sikorsky made a splash at the huge Association of the US Army conference with just a life-size mock-up. Now, just in time to talk it up at AUSA 2014, they’ve built a working […]
WASHINGTON: What is Future Vertical Lift? There is no one answer, but rather a range of possibilities. At one extreme is a single mega-program, building four variants for the four services to replace a host of existing helicopters, a vision in some ways even more ambitious than the long-troubled tri-service Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). At the […]
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
WASHINGTON: Reports that the Army has finally figured out whether the Hamlet of aircraft programs, Armed Aerial Scout, should be or not be are greatly exaggerated. Army aviation acquisition officials have looked at what birds in hand industry can offer to replace the service’s aging OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters and have decided they’d prefer […]