February 18, 2022 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
November 3, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Military Technology Could Bolster Bell’s Commercial Helicopters
Tony Osborne October 30, 2020
Bell is pondering how to incorporate advanced technologies developed for its future military platforms into its commercial rotorcraft.
Since its rebranding as more of a technology company than a helicopter OEM, CEO Mitch Snyder has been pushing the company on a course of innovation, investing in autonomous flight and electric propulsion as well as advancing defense capabilities.
But there appears to be little obvious gain for Bell's line of civil rotorcraft. In the last couple of years, its commercial helicopters have received only fairly minor upgrades. The Model 407GXi light single-engine platform had its avionics upgraded so that it can fly under instrument flight rules, while the Model 412 medium twin received new avionics and uprated power. Yet both upgrades were essentially spun off from modifications for military programs.
The 407 update was developed for the U.S. Navy's rotary-wing trainer requirement, which Bell lost to Leonardo, and the 412EPi was born from the type's selection by Japan for its UH-X military utility requirement.
Bell's restraint in further developing commercial rotorcraft likely is due to its prolonged effort to bring the new Model 525 to market. Nor is it a great time to bring a new aircraft to market. Sales remain stubbornly slow in the aftermath of a fall in energy prices that dramatically reduced orders from the lucrative oil-and-gas support market.
Progress in bringing the fly-by-wire, 9.3-metric-ton 525 super-medium to market—it was launched in 2012 and flown for the first time in 2015—has been painfully slow, in part due to the fatal loss of one prototype but also due to the need to convince certification authorities of fly-by-wire technology benefits. “The hurdle is higher now to try and get [the 525] certified,” Snyder told Aviation Week during a virtual roundtable on Oct. 19.
“This technology brings all these benefits and makes the aircraft safer. . . . You have to walk them through and give them time to understand it,” he said.
Snyder believes things are on track. “We feel very good about getting certified in 2021,” he added, noting that the company is finishing up testing and preparing for the submission of certification documentation to the FAA. He said Bell is continuing to evaluate new commercial platforms, although the cost of development and certification is prohibitive.
“We're always looking to see if there's a clean-sheet out there that we may want to do,” he said. “But I can tell you, at least right now, our focus has been around derivatives to our military products and more about adapting upgrades to our existing models.”
The approach appears to be in line with his views at last year's Paris Air Show, where he suggested Bell may not develop a new clean-sheet commercial conventional rotorcraft beyond the 525.
One area of opportunity could be development of a single-engine medium helicopter, he hinted, building on Bell's Model 360 Invictus prototype for the U.S. Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) requirement.
“Bell's got a lot of single-mediums out there,” said Snyder, noting that hundreds of Model 204/205 Iroquois helicopters remain in service with militaries, civilian operators and government agencies. Operators have become reliant on twin-engine helicopters, particularly because in some parts of the world, notably Europe, single-engine rotorcraft are banned from flying over urban areas. But Snyder said the 360 Invictus also features a supplemental power unit that can act as an auxiliary power unit as well as provide additional performance or auto-rotation power, and could be an enabler for a single-engine medium.
It is possible that Bell is looking at a military utility variant of the 360 Invictus, pairing the aircraft with the attack version in the same way that its UH-1Y Venom and AH-1Z Viper platforms have built on the Huey and Cobra. Such a platform could receive interest from the U.S. special operations community, which is looking to replace the Boeing AH-6/MH-6 Little Bird family. Officials have noted that they would like to be able to adapt a FARA platform to carry troops. Sikorsky's Raider X can do so, but the Bell FARA cannot, until a more utilitarian version emerges (AW&ST June 1-14, p. 28).
The Army's selection of Bell's V-280 tiltrotor as the larger Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft could enable a commercial spinoff of the platform, Snyder suggests.
Bell is also looking to make commercial use of its Electrically Distributed Anti-Torque (EDAT) technology, a ducted electric tailrotor system tested on a Bell 429 light-twin. Flight tests for it were only revealed in February, despite the aircraft's flights in plain sight from its Mirabel, Quebec, facility since May 2019. Testing showed that the EDAT reduced noise levels, but there were also benefits in terms of safety, enabling the option of switching off the anti-torque system while the engines and main rotor are still turning. The EDAT eliminates complex tailrotor gearboxes and shafts and requires less costly inspections and maintenance as well.
“We pulled in off-the-shelf technologies to make the demo occur within one year,” said Snyder. “Now we're evaluating what the real technology needs to be as far as repackaging it in the weight and size that we require.”
Snyder said the EDAT technology will be aimed at a commercial rotorcraft, but for which product line or when it might be commercially available has yet to be decided.
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August 18, 2023 | International, Aerospace
BAE Systems to buy Colorado-based Ball Aerospace for $5.55bn
The takeover is meant to strengthen the British company's position in the defense-related space business.
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May 19, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Land, C4ISR, Security
Project Convergence: Linking Army Missile Defense, Offense, & Space
The Army wants to do a tech demonstration in the southwestern desert – COVID permitting – of how the new weapons systems it's developing can share data. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: As the Army urgently develops its 31 top-priority technologies for future war, service leaders are studying a proposal to field-test some of them together later this year, Army officials told me. The technology demonstration, known as Project Convergence, is still tentative, a spokesperson for the Army's Pentagon headquarters cautioned me. There's no guarantee it will even happen this year, in no small part because the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted field testing, wargames, and training exercises across the Army. If it does happen, it's far from settled which systems will be involved. Nevertheless, from what I've gleaned, Project Convergence will probably try to form a “sensor-to-shooter” network that shares data between systems being developed in at least three of the Army's Big Six modernization portfolios: Long-Range Precision Fires, the Army's No. 1 modernization priority, which aims to rebuild the artillery with new long-range cannons and surface-to-surface missiles to hit ground targets; The Army Network, priority No. 4, which will link Army units using everything from software-defined digital radios to new Low Earth Orbit satellites; and Air & Missile Defense, priority No. 5, which is developing its own specialized, high-speed network, IBCS, to relay targeting data on fast-flying threats with split-second accuracy. I've not heard specifically about systems from the Army's other three major modernization portfolios: armored vehicles (priority No. 2), high-speed aircraft (No. 3), and soldier gear (No. 6). But the Army envisions all of them as sharing intelligence over the network. “The Next Generation Ground Vehicle is an important sensor and observer for Long-Range Precision Fires,” said Brig. Gen. John Rafferty, the LRPF director at Army Futures Command. “Same with Future Vertical Lift, same with the Army's space strategy led by APNT, and the network enables all of this.” In fact, the Army ultimately wants to connect its units to the Air Force, Marines, Navy, and Space Force through a future network-of-networks called JADC2. That's short for Joint All-Domain Command & Control, a vision of seamlessly coordinating operations across the five official “domains”: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. “We have to make sure that what we technically demonstrate later this year fits into a larger JADC2 architecture,” Rafferty told me in a recent interview. “I view this as kind of the ground portion of JADC2. How do we meet JADC2 in the middle? We're going to start from the ground up, they're going from space down.” “We have to have a capability to converge these different systems at the decisive place and time,” he said. “We have to have a network.” Many of the necessary network technologies are ones under consideration for what's called Capability Set 23, a package of network upgrades set to enter service in three years. The first round of upgrades, CS 21, goes to infantry units next year. But CS 23, focused on far-ranging armored formations, aims to add extensive new long-range communication capabilities using Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Mid-Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites. “Every two years we're developing a new set of kit that we deliver as part of those capability sets,” Col. Shane Taylor told last week's C4ISRnet online conference. “We've got Project Convergence that we're working with the Network CFT this fall out in the desert, and you're gonna see a lot of MEO work out there.” Taylor works for Program Executive Office (PEO) Command, Control, & Communications – Tactical (C3T), which is independent, by law, of Army Futures Command but works closely with it to develop and build the network. Satellites are essential to connect units that can't form direct radio links because of intervening mountains, buildings, or the horizon itself. But LEO and MEO are particularly valuable for communications, because they can relay signals with less lag and greater bandwidth than high-altitude satellites in Geosynchronous (GEO) orbits. “In some cases, it's almost having fiber optic cable through a space-based satellite link,” Army Futures Command's network director, Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, told me in a recent interview. That kind of network capacity is particularly crucial for connecting “sensors to shooters.” Sure, old-fashioned radio or more modern chat-style systems work okay for reporting where a unit is moving or what supplies are running low. But targeting data, especially for moving targets, requires much more precision and becomes out of date much more quickly. “It's the second oldest challenge for artillery,” Rafferty told me, ever since 19th century cannon began to shoot over the horizon at targets their gunners couldn't see. “The oldest challenge is shooting farther, the second challenge is the sensor to shooter part: How do you minimize the time between the observation of the target and the delivery of the effects?” For the longest-range new weapons the Army is developing, like ground-based hypersonic missiles and thousand-mile superguns, the sensor-to-shooter problem is even harder, because the Army doesn't have any sensors that can see that far. Nor does it intend to build them: The service's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, has said publicly the Army doesn't need its own reconnaissance satellites. So while the Army is buying new Grey Eagle -Extended Range scout drones with an estimated range of 200 miles, longer-range shots will rely on Space Force satellites and Air Force and Navy reconnaissance planes to spot targets. Another potential source of information for long-range offensive fires, Rafferty said, is the Army's air and missile defense force. While air and missile defense radars are designed to track flying targets, they can also often calculate where missiles and artillery shells are being fired from, and those enemy batteries are prime targets for the Army's own long-range weapons. It's also much easier to blow up an enemy launcher on the ground – ideally before it fires – rather than try to shoot down projectiles in flight, so, where possible, the best missile defense is a good offense. “I started to really think about this a few years ago when I did an exercise in Europe, called the Austere Challenge, when I was still a brigade commander,” Rafferty told me. “It was an eye-opening exercise for me because I'd never really operated at the theater level.... I started to see the importance of that teamwork between the theater-level [offensive] fires and the theater-level air defense systems.” Training and modernization for both offensive and defense fires are based out of Fort Sill, Okla. “We're lucky because the Air and Missile Defense Cross Functional Team is right downstairs,” Rafferty said. Rafferty's counterpart for air and missile defense is Brig. Gen. Brian Gibson. “It's about connections and access to the data,” Gibson told me in a recent interview. “Sharing the right data with the right user at the right time, along latency timelines that are useful... is really where the trick to this puzzle lies.” “The most important part,” Gibson said, “where most of the work has gone on, is to understand where the linkages need to occur” between the Army's general-purpose Integrated Tactical Network (ITN) – that's what CS 21 and CS 23 are building — and the specialized, high-performance network for air and missile defense, IBCS. As hard as it is to hit a moving target on the ground, it's exponentially more difficult to hit one in the air, especially a supersonic cruise missile or ballistic missile moving at many times the speed of sound. If your targeting data is a millisecond out of date, you may miss entirely. So, explained Gibson and his acquisition program partner, Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch (PEO Missiles & Space), you can't add anything to the IBCS network without making very sure it won't slow that data down. But IBCS can certainly output the data it's already collecting for other systems to use, including long-range precision fires. “They can be a consumer of IBCS,” Rasch told me. And since ground targets don't move as fast as missiles, he said, IBCS wouldn't have to send updates to offensive artillery batteries at the same frenetic pace that air and missile defense units require. “It doesn't have to be in milliseconds,” he said. “It can be in seconds.” Yes, seconds seem like a long time in missile defense, but to someone shooting at ground targets, that's lightning-quick. “We've got great opportunities to leverage IBCS,” Rafferty said. “The way I view it, that's another sensor, with very capable radars, and that integrated air defense network is reliable and fast.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/project-convergence-linking-army-missile-defense-offense-space