March 26, 2020 | International, Aerospace
The Bell 360 Invictus and the Sikorsky Raider-X will vie for the final contract to build FARA, with rival prototypes in flight by 2023. Bell and Sikorsky (with Boeing) are also facing off for the FLRAA transport.
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR
WASHINGTON: The Army has now narrowed its future aircraft choices to Sikorsky vs. Bell.
This afternoon, the service announced that it had picked Sikorsky and Bell to build competing prototypes for Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), a high-speed optionally manned scout to replace the retired Bell OH-58 Kiowa. Just eight days ago, it picked the same two firms – plus aerospace giant Boeing, acting as Sikorsky's de facto junior partner – to compete for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), which will replace the Sikorsky's UH-60 Black Hawk as the military's aerial workhorse for everything from Ranger raids to medevac.
The FLRAA transport decision was no surprise. The Army picked the two teams it had been funding for years to develop prototypes, the Bell V-280 Valor tiltrotor and the Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 Defiant.
There was more uncertainty over the FARA scout, because the service had given five companies Other Transaction Authority contracts to develop designs. Of those five, only Sikorsky had built and flight-tested an actual aircraft, the S-97 Raider, of which its Raider-X design is basically a super-sized version. Sikorsky and Bell now get to build FARA prototypes, while AVX, Boeing, and Karem have been cut.
While AVX and Karem are design houses that have never built an actual aircraft, Boeing is a major aerospace player for which this is just the latest in a series of blows.
Sikorsky and Bell have taken starkly different approaches to Future Vertical Lift. For both the FARA scout and the FLRAA transport, Sikorsky is offering its signature compound helicopters, descended from its record-breaking X2, that use a combination of ultra-rigid coaxial rotors and a pusher propeller to overcome the aerodynamic limits that cap the speed and range of traditional helicopters. No compound helicopter has ever entered mass production, but Sikorsky has built and flown two S-97 prototypes and, with Boeing, the much larger SB>1 Defiant: Raider-X will fall between the S-97 and SB>1 in size.
Bell's marquee technology is the tiltrotor, most famously the widely used V-22 Osprey, using two massive rotors that tilt forward like a propeller for level flight and upwards like a helicopter for vertical takeoff and landing. It's a next-gen tiltrotor, the V-280 Valor, that Bell is flying for FLRAA.
But Bell couldn't scale down their tiltrotor design – whose side-by-side rotors inevitably make for a wide aircraft – enough for the Army's FARA scout, which is meant to fly down city streets in urban warzones. So instead, their Bell 360 Invictus is, in essence, a streamlined conventional helicopter with wings: It has a single main rotor and a tail rotor, just like the old Kiowa, but it adds winglets to help with lift for high-speed fleet.
Sikorsky argues their compound helicopter configuration is inherently much more efficient, pointing out that Bell's design requires more horsepower to achieve the Army's required speeds. Bell argues their time-tested single-main-rotor configuration will be less risky to develop, cheaper to buy, and easier to maintain.
They each have three years to prove their case to the Army.
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/fvl-army-picks-bell-sikorsky-for-fara-scout
January 31, 2024 | International, Aerospace
The move follows a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that lifts some restrictions on what range fees the Space Force can collect.
August 13, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Lee Hudson August 12, 2020 The Pentagon is in the early stages of replacing the troubled Lockheed Martin F-35's autonomous logistics system with a new, cloud-based network, and hopes to get it up and running by the end of 2022. The Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN) is intended to reduce workload and increase F-35 mission readiness rates by using a smaller, deployable, commercial and cloud-native architecture. Right now, F-35 users operate the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) that collects inflight information for maintainers to predict part failures. However, the problem-plagued logistics system has encountered numerous issues that range from directing unnecessary maintenance actions, taking too long to boot up and time-consuming data entry. For example, users told the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that electronic records are frequently corrupt or missing, resulting in ALIS signaling the jet should not fly. This occurs in cases where maintainers know the aircraft is safe for flight. Maintainers at one location told the GAO they experienced as many as 400 issues per week for one six-month period in 2019. The F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) plans to begin installing hardware this September that can run software from both the legacy and new systems until ODIN is deployed fully. ODIN initial delivery is planned for September 2021. ODIN hardware is designed to have a 75% smaller footprint than the legacy system, and be approximately 94% lighter—50 lb. compared with 891 lb. Another radical difference between the two systems is F-35 prime contractor Lockheed owns ALIS development and the new network is being developed by the JPO. The JPO is using agile software development tools that allow rapid updates and improvements like how Apple updates its iPhones, while Lockheed employs waterfall development that allows for updates every 12-18 months. In January, the JPO hit its first milestone by moving existing F-35 data into a new, integrated environment that will support applications designed by organizations such as Kessel Run, one of the Air Force's software factories. Kessel Run formed a team called Mad Hatter and tasked it to build software applications to render F-35 logistics more user-friendly. A key complaint about ALIS was the lack of realistic operational requirements. In other words, user needs can become outdated. To address this shortcoming, the JPO partner nations agreed in January to update a requirements document for ODIN annually—if needed. Instead of crafting a rigid requirements document that will be outdated in 10 years, the new strategy calls for updating protocols based on reality, according to a program office maintenance systems expert. This strategy complies with the software acquisition policy of Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord. It calls for the users, developers and software designers to come together and produce a customer-centric design as development progresses. The requirements document features six capability needs: deployment planning and execution; unit maintenance planning; sortie generation; sustainment readiness; information management, and ODIN support. The document also includes 43 performance measurements that the JPO will use as metrics to track ODIN development. Beyond better programmatic planning, the Pentagon is facing a considerable obstacle as it transitions from ALIS to ODIN. The JPO is having trouble receiving technical data from Lockheed, Lord told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “While the department recognizes industry's interest in protecting intellectual property, there is technical data that the department has rights to and needs in order to enable effective organic sustainment,” Lord noted in written testimony submitted to the committee. In response to Lord's comments, Lockheed noted the company does not own all the logistics system's intellectual-property and data rights. “ALIS software is also government-owned, per contract requirements with Lockheed, and our suppliers retaining intellectual property and data rights to portions of software that were developed using industry's investment funds is in accordance with the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement,” Lockheed spokesman Brett Ashworth tells Aviation Week. The Pentagon's overarching goal is to drive down F-35 sustainment pricing, which is where most of a program's cost resides. The government is still upgrading ALIS, an effort known as ALIS Next, before ODIN comes online to manage costs. ALIS Next consists of more regular software updates, instead of the program's current 12-18 month cycle. An updated version of ALIS, known as 3.5, is outfitted with 300 stability fixes, says F-35 Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Eric Fick. Air Force software developers and Lockheed Martin personnel are simultaneously continuing to issue ALIS software patches. ALIS Next provides an opportunity to reduce the amount of administrative personnel needed to support the logistics system's operations in the field. An important step to lowering the overall F-35 sustainment price is reducing the cost per flying hour. The goal is for the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing jet, the most popular variant, was $25,000 by 2025. “We are confident $25,000 is attainable, but it will require collaboration with the JPO, services, allies and our industry partners to reduce overall cost,” Lockheed F-35 Vice President and General Manager Greg Ulmer submitted in written testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Over the past five years, the company has reduced a portion of the F-35's operations and sustainment costs by 38%. Lockheed is responsible for 39% of all F-35 sustainment costs, according to Ulmer. The company estimates it will drive down controlled cost another 50% in the next five years, and it is working with the government to achieve similar savings on the remaining 61% of flight-hour costs that are under the purview of the Defense Department and propulsion suppliers. Although in its infancy, ODIN is set to be the cornerstone for the next major wave of F-35 sustainment improvements over the next two years as ALIS is retired. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/pentagon-rethinks-troubled-f-35-logistics-system
July 24, 2020 | International, Land
July 23, 2020 - The U.S. Army has awarded BAE Systems an initial order under its Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) Capability Drop 2 Program. The multiple award, Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity contract is worth up to $823 million, and provides enhanced intelligence to see and better understand threats and other relevant aspects of the operational environment. The company's solution for Capability Drop 2 is the Intelligence Knowledge Environment (IKE). It's a software framework of modular data and artificial intelligence analytic capabilities built to autonomously transform information into knowledge. “With a focus on a user-centric analyst experience, IKE rapidly transforms data into intelligence in an easy to learn and scalable manner,” said Dave Logan, vice president and general manager of C4ISR Systems at BAE Systems. “It helps analysts translate information into actionable intelligence using a collection of tools – some interactive, others that operate autonomously – to enhance the effectiveness of the analyst.” The Capability Drop development model allows the Army to rapidly insert new technology upgrades to DCGS by breaking requirements into small bundles, enabling agile and rapid acquisition. The company's Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance systems provide robust processing and exploitation capabilities that enable the analysis of intelligence data from a variety of sources, in any mission environment. BAE Systems developed the IKE framework at its site in San Diego, California. Ref. No. 068/2020 View source version on BAE Systems: https://www.baesystems.com/en/article/u-s--army-awards-distributed-common-ground-system-capability-drop-2-to-bae-systems