March 18, 2020 | International, Aerospace
After two years of intensive digital engineering, in 2020 the Army will pick either a Bell tiltrotor or a Sikorsky-Boeing compound helicopter to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk.
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
WASHINGTON: A Sikorsky-Boeing team won a $97 million award to refine their SB>1 Defiant high-speed helicopter over the next two years, the Army announced today, while Bell Textron won $84 million for its V-280 Valor tiltrotor. The two designs are vying to replace the Reagan-era UH-60 Black Hawk, the Army's workhorse air assault and medevac transport.
The difference in amounts purely reflects the different approaches the two teams proposed for what's called Competitive Demonstration & Risk Reduction, Army officials told reporters. It doesn't imply either team has an advantage going into 2022, when the service will choose one design as its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), with the first operational units flying in 2030.
FLRAA is just part of the flying “ecosystem” of manned and unmanned aircraft that the Army is developing under its Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, which in turn is just one of eight CFTs working on 31 high-priority projects. But FLRAA has been unusually visible, literally, because – as part of a program called the Joint Multi-Role Tech Demonstration – both companies have prototype aircraft actually flying.
As we've reported previously, the SB>1 Defiant started flight tests a year later than the V-280 Valor, but Army officials reasserted today they'll have enough test data on both aircraft.
“The flight envelope continues to expand for Sikorsky-Boeing, so they're flying a bit more aggressively now than the V-280,” said Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, head of the FVL CFT. “Towards the end of this fiscal year, maybe August, we're going to see very comparable data on both.”
“Flight time is only one of the inputs that goes into a multivariable non-linear calculation,” added the Army's aviation acquisition chief, Program Executive Officer Pat Mason. Not all flight hours are equally valuable, he told reporters, and flight hours alone are not enough. “[It's] what you did in flight, what you've done in modeling and simulation, how you're administering model design, how you [set up] your digital engineering development environment, what you've done in your component test, lab test, SIL [System Integration Lab] test. Taking the totality of those elements into consideration, what we see is a good competition between two vendors.”
So while the two aircraft will continue flying to provide more performance data, the lion's share of the work over the next two years will be digital, explained the Army's program manager for FLRAA. “The preponderance of this effort is associated with digital engineering and model-based systems engineering,” Col. David Philips said. That means taking the real-world data from physical tests and rigorously refining every aspect of the design to meet the Army's needs from flight performance, combat survivability, affordability, sustainability, safety and more.
The program's reached the phase of design refinement that's traditionally handled by engineers with slide rules on “reams of paper,” Mason explained, but which will now be accomplished in painstakingly precise virtual models and simulations of every aspect of the aircraft.
“That is the future of design,” Mason said. “The key is that digital environment.... digital engineering and model-based engineering.”
The flight tests of physical aircraft are proving out their novel configurations – designed to achieve high speed and long range that are aerodynamically unattainable for conventional helicopters. But the digital design phase is especially suited for working out the software that's essential to everything from flight controls to navigation to evading incoming anti-aircraft missiles.
Rather than have each vendor fit the electronic jigsaw together in their own unique, proprietary way, the Army insists that FLRAA, its sister design the FARA scout, and a whole family of drones all use the same Modular Open Systems Architecture. MOSA is meant to ensure that all the aircraft can easily share data on everything from maintenance diagnostics to enemy targets, and that the Army can easily replace specific components (hence “modular”) using whatever vendor offers the best technology (hence “open”).
To ensure different vendors' products plug and play together, Mason said, “we specify what we need in those interfaces, and we flow those out in models.” Those models will include simulations of the aircrafts' physical characteristics, but, since they're software themselves, they can contain the actual prototype code for the Modular Open Systems Architecture.
In other words — let's get digital.
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/fvl-bell-sikorsky-boeing-split-181m-to-finalize-flraa-designs
April 18, 2024 | International, Land
The three AUKUS navies may see advanced undersea technology like small drones and AI-enabled target recognition tools tested and fielded this year.
April 17, 2023 | International, Aerospace
U.S. President Joe Biden's administration notified Congress on Monday of the planned sale to Turkey of avionics software upgrades for its current fleet of F-16 fighter aircraft, a deal valued at up to $259 million.
June 18, 2019 | International, Naval
By: Navy Times staff They'll do much of their hardest work in a world that's icy white, but the Coast Guard's new fleet of Polar Security Cutters will be homeported in the Emerald City. “I am pleased to announce that Seattle, Washington, will be the home of the Coast Guard's new Polar Security Cutters,” said Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Karl L. Schultz in a Monday statement emailed to Navy Times. “The Pacific Northwest has been the home of our icebreaking fleet since 1976, and I am confident that the Seattle area will continue to provide the support we need to carry out our critical operations in the polar regions.” Coast Guard officials said that Seattle won out over other potential locations because of “operational and logistical needs.” Two months ago, the Navy and Coast Guard awarded Mississippi shipbuilder VT Halter Marine, Inc. a contract that could be worth as much as $1.9 billion to build three heavy icebreakers. The Polar Security-class vessels will be designed to conduct search and rescue, maritime law enforcement, environmental response and national defense patrols missions in areas often covered in heavy ice. A longtime resident of the Seattle suburbs, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell cheered the announcement in a prepared statement released Monday evening. “This is great news. Homeporting new icebreakers in Puget Sound shows the significant role Washington state has to play in securing our waters and protecting our environment in the Arctic. The Puget Sound region supports a cutting-edge maritime workforce, which is poised to meet the needs of these new world-class vessels,” said Cantwell, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, one of the panels overseeing the Coast Guard. “I am excited to welcome new polar icebreakers and their Coast Guard crews to Seattle in the near future.” Cantwell has long fought to maintain and expand the Coast Guard's icebreaker fleet, including sparring with President Barack Obama's administration over funding to build the new icebreakers. Construction on the first icebreaker is slated to begin in 2021 with delivery three years later, but there are financial incentives in the contract for early delivery, according to the Pentagon. Congress also indicated that it expects the heavy breakers and other vessels to spend more time in Alaska. Lawmakers earmarked $53 million to construct cutter support facilities in Alaska. That hasn't been the preferred destination for the Coast Guard's heavy icebreakers, which are down to one semi-working vessel and the skeleton of another that's used to harvest spare parts to keep the other one running. Commissioned in 1976, the Polar Star annually crunches a channel through miles of thick ice to reach McMurdo Station, the main logistics hub for the National Science Foundation's personnel in Antarctica, including researchers at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and remote field camps. Supply vessels follow behind the breaker, but by the end of Operation Deep Freeze, its 11,200-mile journey, it's usually so battered that it spends much of the rest of the year in dry dock, undergoing repairs. Last year, it caught on fire. During a May 28 meeting with reporters in Alaska, Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan grumbled that the new breakers need to spend more time in the Arctic and less at the bottom of the world. “I write the Coast Guard bill. I chair that subcommittee; we'll see,” he was quoted as saying. Sullivan chairs the Security Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation panel. The Coast Guard's medium breaker Healy draws the nation's Arctic duties. During last year's 129-day deployment, it plied the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Although it mostly supported scientific exploration during that tour, Healy also is used for search and rescue missions, escorting warships and other vessels through ice-jammed waterways, environmental protection and enforcing the law in an Arctic region increasingly under pressure from Russia and China. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/06/18/coast-guard-picks-homeport-for-new-icebreaker-fleet/