September 25, 2024 | International, Aerospace
The Space Force has told Congress it plans to spend $1 billion on Resilient GPS over the next five years.
March 25, 2024 | International, Land
But before it works, the service must break from antiquated acquisition processes that prevent rapid purchases and slow down deliveries to soldiers.
February 4, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — General Electric Aviation beat the Advanced Turbine Engine Company — a Honeywell and Pratt & Whitney team — to win the $517 million award for the engineering, manufacturing and development phase of the Improved Turbine Engine Program, or ITEP. “We are honored to be chosen by the Army to continue powering their Black Hawks and Apaches for decades to come,” said Tony Mathis, president and CEO of GE Aviation's military business. “We've invested the resources and infrastructure to execute immediately, and our team is ready to get to work on delivering the improved capabilities of the T901 to the warfighter.” The fierce competition started more than a decade ago, and its outcome will influence Army rotorcraft for decades to come. GE's T901 engine is now set to replace the T700 used by the Army's legacy utility and attack helicopters, but could also potentially outfit the Army's next generation reconnaissance helicopter in the Future Vertical Lift family of systems. “The requirements documents for the [Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft] specifiesTHE ITEP engine. It has got the FVL stamp of approval,” Jim Thomson, Jr., acting deputy director for the Army's future vertical lift cross functional team, told Defense News in a recent interview. ITEP answers a number of problems that emerged as the Army operated Apaches and Black Hawks during combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. The AH-64 and UH-60 became heavier as the service added armor and other upgrades during wartime, and they flew in hotter conditions and higher altitudes than would normally be optimal. “The helicopters were originally designed to work at 4,000 feet on a 95-degree day, and they were flying them much higher than that,” Mike Sousa, GE's business development leader for advanced turboshaft engines, told Defense News in December 2018. “When you do that, you just don't have as much power from the engine.” The Army's requirements for ITEP were clear throughout the process: Design a 3,000 shaft horsepower engine that reduces fuel consumption by 25 percent and increases its service life by 20 percent compared to the T700, a 2,000 shaft horsepower engine. Both companies were awarded risk reduction contracts in August 2016, with ATEC getting $154 million and GE Aviation getting $102 million to further refine their designs. Both companies had already spent years conceptualizing new engines and developing novel tech. GE, the incumbent manufacturer of the T700, offered a single spool engine. Sousa said that configuration would help the company meet weight requirements while removing cost and complexity from the design. “Our fundamental approach there was how do we keep this engine as affordable as possible and as low weight as possible,” he told Defense News in 2018. “Helicopters are unique in that they fly into very dirty environments, very austere environments, unprepared landing strips, unprepared surfaces,” added Ron Hutter, GE's executive director of the T901 program. “They generate a lot of dust. You really want to look at the simplicity of the architecture in terms of maintainability. That's another aspect that drove us to stick with the single-spool configuration.” GE estimates that it's spent $9 billion in testing technologies relevant to the T901. ATEC had proposed a double spool engine it dubbed the T900. “We were disappointed to learn that the U.S. Army did not select our offering,” said Craig Madden, president of ATEC. “We believe that we offered the most advanced, capable and lowest risk engine for ITEP for the Army to improve the overall performance of its Apache and Black Hawk fleets.” https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/02/02/general-electric-wins-517-million-contract-to-build-engines-for-armys-next-generation-helicopters
July 27, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Steve Trimble In piecing together a delicate plan to field two advanced rotorcraft simultaneously within a decade, the U.S. Army chose its priorities carefully. The Army could load the first Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) and Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) with advanced new systems and weapons needed for operations in the 2030s or keep to existing or highly mature technologies and field both aircraft years earlier. Ultimately, the Army selected an acquisition strategy based on the latter. Increment 1 versions of the FLRAA and FARA are now scheduled to enter service together in the third quarter of fiscal 2030. More advanced Increment 2 versions of both should enter service in 2034 and 2035, respectively. U.S. Army FVL Vision: Competition, open systems and incremental upgrades Empty weight and costs emerge as early concerns But the key to fielding both increments for each new type on time may depend less on rotor systems and drivetrains than on software architecture and resolving industry concerns about government demands for data rights. In a series of briefings to defense contractors the week of July 13, Army leaders laid out a vision for using the FLRAA and FARA contracts to change the aviation branch's relationship with suppliers. The Army is seeking to make the aircraft and mission systems installed on both as common as possible, with a modular open-systems architecture (MOSA) allowing the service to rapidly upgrade payloads, subsystems and design rights, thereby enabling a perpetual cycle of competitive bidding. Although the Army's commitment to the new industrial model was clear, the service's acquisition leaders acknowledged that such a strategy will force companies at all levels of the supply chain to adopt a new, unproven business model. “Most of you are thinking, ‘OK, a modular systems approach is a nice buzz term, but how do I sell that to a board of directors; how do I sell it to the [company] leadership?' Because I can potentially give up all of the future revenue streams,” says Pat Mason, the program executive officer for Army aviation. “So we owe you greater answers on that, because it's the question that you're asking, and we have to understand your perspective. From that, we then have to develop a clear business case that allows you to move forward.” In purely aircraft performance terms, the FLRAA and FARA requirements do not compromise on performance. Any of the four candidates selected by the Army in March to compete for both contracts—Bell's V-280 and Boeing/Sikorsky's SB-1 for the FLRAA; Bell's 360 Invictus and Sikorsky's Raider X for the FARA—would enter service in 2030 exceeding the 170-kt. speed limit for most conventional helicopters. But despite appearances, speed is not everything in the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program that spawned the FLRAA and FARA contract competitions. The FVL initiative is seeking to introduce a revolutionary leap in how the Army acquires the evolving array of software, electronics, sensors and weapons that come with an aircraft and represent an increasingly important share of its overall capability. With schedule and cost driving the acquisition strategy, the Army will seek to deliver the FARA and FLRAA with as many common electronic systems and payloads as possible, along with a MOSA for software. To minimize schedule and cost risk, FARA and FLRAA aircraft entering service in 2030 will be designed with electronics and systems already available or due to reach a high level of maturity by 2024. More advanced systems capabilities still at the laboratory stage mid-decade will be considered for Increment 2 versions of both types. The Increment 2 version of the FLRAA is scheduled for delivery in fiscal 2034. A year later, the FARA program plans to field an Increment 2 version. Limiting development activity during Increment 1 to the airframe is the Army's goal. “One of the key things we're trying to do with Increment 1 is get the ‘truck' right—the vehicle,” says Jason Lucas, the Army's FLRAA technical division chief. “We need to get us an air vehicle platform that can take us into the future. The other thing that we absolutely have to get right is our architecture, and our modular open-system approach to enable us to integrate advanced technologies [and] keep up with the pace of threats. “One of the things you didn't hear me say is that we need to develop a lot of advanced mission system equipment, a lot of new development” in Increment 1, Lucas adds. “We are going to take existing mission equipment.” The Army's risk-averse approach comes after decades of frustration over new aircraft development. Three failed attempts to field a scout helicopter to perform a mission similar to FARA's weigh on current program leaders. Col. Gregory Fortier, FARA project manager, notes that as a younger officer he had been told to expect an assignment in a Sikorsky/Boeing RAH-66 squadron, a Bell ARH-70 squadron and an Armed Aerial Scout test squadron. “As we know, those three did not come to fruition,” Fortier says, adding that avoiding a fourth program failure requires having “critical and difficult conversations” with industry up front. Such discussions came up during the industry day event. As a possible consequence of relying on existing maturing systems and payloads for the Increment 1 versions of the FARA and FLRAA, Army program managers are growing concerned about aircraft weight estimates. “I'm still seeing very heavy empty weights across our air vehicles, which I don't enjoy,” says Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, director of the Army's FVL cross-functional team. FLRAA and FARA technology “should be lighter and lower-cost,” he says. “You all may say I'm asking for the impossible, but I think it's nuanced. At the end of the day, we're in a hypercompetitive environment with budgets, and if we don't bring things in that are leap-ahead and fully capture the deflationary nature of the technology and get lighter and cheaper, I think we may find ourselves on the outside looking in.” Another difficult conversation inside the programs concerns the Army's plan to demand ownership of more of the intellectual property and data rights for technologies installed in the aircraft. As each of the armed services seeks a greater share of the ownership rights on future weapon systems, the defense industry is being forced to adapt to a new paradigm in the government-industry relationship. “We realize this runs contrary to some of the legacy business models, such as, ‘Here's a box. We want to integrate it and then we want to sustain it for 30 years,' ” says Michael “Ski” Horrocks, integration project manager for FLRAA and FARA mission systems. “So we do have teams working right now brainstorming how to create new collaborative and sustainable business models.” The in-service date for the FLRAA and FARA may be a decade away, but the Army is already facing critical decision points by year-end. The most important is creation of the FVL Architecture Framework (FAF) to define the interfaces and standards for the common mission systems architecture of both. Last year, the Army stood up a body composed of military, industry and academic experts called the Architecture Control Working Group to deliver the FAF by November 2020 for scheduled approval the following month. “We see Increment 2 as an opportunity to provide advanced mission system solutions to help tackle some of the most significant threats and integrate some innovation,” Lucas says. The Army's schedule calls for selecting the FLRAA developer in fiscal 2023 and the FARA prime contractor in fiscal 2024, with limited user tests of production aircraft beginning for each program four years later. But a lesson from the Army's painful experience with new aircraft development suggests little tolerance for costly technology, even if the contractors can deliver better performance. “We can develop and design and deliver this tremendous capability at the end of this fiscal 2028 timeframe,” Fortier says. “But if it's not affordable, they're walking away from it.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/us-army-upgrades-vision-future-vertical-lift-programs