April 26, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By: Jen Judson
WASHINGTON — AVX Aircraft Co. partnered with L-3 Communications Integrated Systems, Bell Helicopter, Boeing, Karem Aircraft and Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky have won awards to design a new Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) for the U.S. Army over the next year, the service announced April 23.
Only two teams will move forward, at the end of the design phase, to build flyable prototypes of the future helicopter in a head-to-head competition.
The Army laid out a handful of mandatory requirements that the vendors had to meet and also a list of desired requirements for initial designs, Col. Craig Alia, the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team chief of staff, told a select group of reporters just ahead of the contract awards.
The service also looked at the vendors' execution plans and evaluated timing as well as funding profile requirements. “The ones that were selected were clearly meeting the mandatory requirements and were in the acceptable risk level of the execution plan and the desired requirements," Dan Bailey, who is the FARA competitive prototype program manager, added. The prototype program falls under the purview of the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation and Missile Center's Aviation Development Directorate.
AVX and L3 unveiled its design for the FARA competition at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual summit in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month. The design uses AVX's compound coaxial and ducted fans technology. The companies said its single-engine design meets 100 percent of the Army's mandatory requirements and 70 percent of its desired attributes.
The CEO of Textron, Bell's parent company, said during a recent earnings call, that its FARA design will be based on its 525 technology rather than its tiltrotor technology. Bell has built and flown a tiltrotor prototype — the V-280 Valor — for the Army's Future Vertical Lift program.
Karem has been working to develop technology under a small contract to help build requirements for FVL aircraft focused on a medium-lift helicopter.
Sikorsky's offering will be based off of its X2 coaxial technology seen in its S-97 Raider and the Sikorsky-Boeing developed SB-1 Defiant, which are now both flying.
“This is the culmination of years of investment in the X2 Technology Demonstrator and the S-97 RAIDER aircraft that have proven the advanced technology and shown its ability to change the future battlefield,” Tim Malia, Sikorsky's director of Future Vertical Lift Light, told Defense News in an emailed statement shortly after the announcement.
“We continue to fly the S-97 RAIDER to inform the design for FARA, which provides significant risk reduction to the program schedule and technical objectives. We are eager to continue to support the US Army, and we are excited that the Sikorsky FARA X2 will be ready for this critical mission," he said.
A total of eight teams submitted data and potential designs for FARA, but upon evaluation, three of those did not meet mandatory requirements, according to Bailey.
It is not publicly stated who the losing teams were, but MD Helicopters had previously protested the Army's decision to not enter into a first phase agreement with the company to develop a FARA prototype, arguing to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the Army “unreasonably” evaluated its proposal and failed to promote small business participation.
The GAO denied the protest earlier this month on the grounds it did not have authority to review protests of contracting mechanisms like Other Transaction Authorities (OTA) which the Army used in this case.
The awards were made two months ahead of an already ambitious schedule to get FARA prototypes flying by 2023. A production decision could happen in 2028, but the service is looking at any way possible to speed up that timeline.
The Army has to move quickly, Alia said. Echoing his boss, Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, the FVL CFT director, he said the Army is “at an inflection point. We can't afford not to modernize. We know the current fleet is fantastic, but we can't indefinitely continue to incrementally improve 1970s to 1980s technology.”
FARA is intended to fill a critical capability gap currently being filled by AH-64E Apache attack helicopters teamed with Shadow unmanned aircraft following the retirement of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters.
The service has tried and failed three times to fill the gap with an aircraft.
The Army is also planning to procure another helicopter to fill the long-range assault mission, replacing some UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters in the fleet, simultaneously.
With the advent of the new Army Futures Command — that is focused on six major modernization priorities of which FVL is third — the service is moving faster on prototyping capability to ultimately procure major weapon systems at a somewhat unprecedented speed. Through the AFC and the use of contracting mechanisms like OTAs, the Army has found a way to compress parts of the acquisition process that previously took three to five years into periods of time often amounting to less than a year.
“What is exciting about the new process the Army has put in place,” Bailey said, “in basically a year's period of time, we've gone through concept, through an approved set of requirements, to developing an innovative approach to contracting, to building industry partnerships to have industry propose to us a plan and a solution.”
And the Army rigorously evaluated those FARA proposals, Bailey said, all within that year.
The teams have until January or February next year to provide design plans and an approach to executing the build of the prototypes followed by potential larger-scale manufacturing, Bailey said.
The second phase of the program will be to build prototypes, and “only two will make it into phase 2 and they all know that now,” Bailey added.
According to Rugen, when the request for proposals was released, the Army did not want to get locked into keeping inflexible requirements, but the request did state that the aircraft should have a maximum 40-foot rotor diameter.
The Army also asked for the aircraft to be able to accept some government furnished equipment including an engine, a gun and a rocket launcher, Alia said.
When it comes to some of the desirable attributes for a new aircraft, the Army is considering speed, range and payload possibilities, Alia said, but the service “wanted to encourage innovation by industry to come to us with their ideas and unique ways of meeting both mandatory and desirable characteristics and that is where we got some great feedback from industry and some innovative designs.”
March 4, 2021 | International, Aerospace
Le gouvernement fédéral a approuvé le mécanisme qui permettra les investissements nécessaires à la production de certaines pièces des F-35 de Lockheed Martin par Asco, Sabca et Sonaca.
September 12, 2022 | International, Aerospace
DARPA's ANCILLARY program aims to develop a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft that can operate in areas without preexisting air bases or other infrastructure.
April 20, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR
Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — The U.S. and Japan need to expand their collaboration on defense technologies in the future, with a specific focus on four technologies that can help counter the rise of China, according to a new report released Friday by the Atlantic Council. The report also highlights the ongoing discussions about U.S. involvement in Japan's next domestic fighter program as a high-stakes situation that could dictate industrial cooperation between the two nations for years. “The most important component of cooperation on defense capabilities is direct coordination and collaboration on emerging technologies and capabilities,” write authors Tate Nurkin and Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, identifying unmanned systems, hypersonic/hyper-velocity missiles, and the defense applications of AI as three key areas where the U.S. and Japan need to start working together on. “These three areas are at the center of the intensifying U.S.-China military-technological competition. They are key to challenging or upholding military balances and stabilizing imbalances in and across key domain-area competitions — strike versus air and missile defense or undersea — on which regional and, over time, global security is at least partly based,” the authors note. Specifically, the authors identify four project areas that both fit into U.S. strategy and Japan's regional interests, while also matching industrial capabilities: Swarming technology and the loyal wingman: For several years the Pentagon has been investing R&D funding into the development of drones that can be slaved to a fighter jet, providing a “loyal wingman” controlled by the one pilot. Drone swarms are another area of heavy investment. Both concepts fit for Japan, whose Ministry of Defense expressed interest in both concepts going back as far as 2016. Unmanned underwater vehicles and anti-submarine warfare capabilities: China has invested heavily in submarines over the last decade, both manned and unmanned. The U.S. has also begun investing in UUV capabilities, but while Japan's IHI has developed a domestic UUV, the MoD has yet to go all in on the capability. The authors note it is a logical area of collaboration. AI-enabled synthetic training environments: The U.S. and Japan ran a joint synthetic training exercise in 2016, but the authors would like to see development expanded in the future. “Given both countries' need to accelerate training, their shared competency in machine learning and virtual and augmented reality, and a highly fractured simulation and training market, there is potential for a collaborative program to develop a synthetic simulation and training capability, to stress the specific operational contingencies to which US and Japanese forces will have to respond,” they write. Counter-unmanned systems: The entire world seems to be investing in weapons to counter unmanned systems, but the authors see a solid spot for the two nations to find workable technologies together. Japan's acquisition group is currently testing a “high-power microwave generation system” for this mission. That all sounds good on paper, the authors acknowledge, but there are very real challenges to increasing technology development between the two countries. Japan's modernization priorities are best viewed through a defensive lens, designed to protect the island nation. That's a contrast to America's posture in the region, which tends more towards force projection. In addition, Japan lags in military space and cyber operations compared to the U.S., making cross-domain collaboration challenging in several areas. Those negotiations have also been impacted by “different perceptions of the nature of joint technology research,” the authors write. “U.S. defense officials have ‘emphasized operational concepts and capability requirements as the basis for collaboration,' while Japanese officials have ‘continued to focus on technology development and industrial base interests.'” Other challenges include Japan's 1 percent-of-GDP cap on defense spending, as well as the state of Japan's defense industry, which until 2014 was focused entirely on serving the Japanese government's needs. Hence, the industry, while technically very competent, is also relatively small, with limited export experiences – and Tokyo has an interest in protecting that industry with favorable contracts. Meanwhile, U.S. firms have concerns about “potentially losing revenue, transfer of sensitive technologies, and the potential replacement of US companies with Japanese ones in critical supply chains,” the authors write. Some of those issues have come to the forefront in the ongoing discussions about what role American firms can play in Japan's ongoing fighter development program. Japan recently rejected an offer by Lockheed Martin of a hybrid F-22/F-35 design, stating that “developing derivatives of existing fighters cannot be a candidate from the perspective of a Japan-led development.” Getting the F-3 deal right will have long term implications for how the two nations develop capabilities together, the authors warn, quoting defense analyst Gregg Rubinstein in saying “Successfully defining a path to U.S.-Japanese collaboration on this program could make the F-3 an alliance-building centerpiece of cooperative defense acquisition” while failure to do so could “undermine prospects for future collaboration in defense capabilities development.” Putting aside the internal issues, any collaboration between the U.S. and Japan has to be considered through the lens it will be see in Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Seoul. “Even marginal differences in perception produce limits to the parameters of U.S.-Japan joint development of, and coordination on, military capabilities. Especially provocative programs like joint hypersonic-missile development will be viewed as escalatory, and will likely generate a response from China,Russia, and/or North Korea that could complicate other trade or geopolitical interests that go beyond Northeast Asia,” the authors warn, noting that China could attempt to exert more pressure on the ASEAN nations as a counterweight. Additionally, South Korea would likely “see substantial U.S.-Japan collaboration not through an adversarial lens, but certainly through the lens of strained relations stemming from both historical and contextual issues, further complicating U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea trilateral cooperation.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/global/asia-pacific/2020/04/16/four-technologies-japan-and-the-us-should-team-on-to-counter-china/