Army’s Future Tiltrotor Gets Heavier So It Can Rapidly Convert Into Special Ops Variant
Turning UH-60s into Night Stalker MH-60s is a complicated process, and the hope is to avoid that with the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft.
The U.S. Army has incorporated special operations-specific requirements into the design of its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) tiltrotor, which has led to an unspecified increase in gross weight. The changes are intended to make it cheaper and easier to convert baseline FLRAAs into special operations versions for the Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). The current process for turning standard UH-60M Black Hawks into special operations MH-60Ms is very complex and resource-intensive.
Lt. Col. Cameron Keogh, Program Manager for both Future Vertical Lift and the MH-60 within U.S. Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) Program Executive Office-Rotary Wing (PEO-RW), provided an update on the special operations end of the FLRAA effort at the annual SOF Week conference today. The Army announced it had selected a design based on Bell’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor as the winner of its FLRAA competition in 2022. FLRAAs are expected to replace a significant portion of H-60 Black Hawk variants across the entire Army, including around half of the 160th’s special operations MH-60Ms.
When it comes to FLRAA, “we are very tightly nested with Big Army on this one. We, again, are about half a step behind. They put in their base contract some CLINs [Contract Line Item Numbers] for us to use for development,” Keogh explained. “We started with some engineering analysis.”
“We’re going to have to hang all the mission equipment that we currently have on the ramp, or that we’re gonna have on the ramp at that point in time when this is fielded,” he continued. “Do we have the structural provisions to do that? Do we have space reserve to [sic] where we could put this stuff?”
https://www.twz.com/air/armys-future-tiltrotor-gets-heavier-so-it-can-rapidly-convert-into-special-ops-variant
