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.

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.

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AVX Aircraft (Fort Worth), an innovative design firm that’s now teamed with L-3 (Waco), which provides actual manufacturing capability AVX has lacked;

Bell (also Fort Worth), whose gamble on offering an upgraded conventional helicopter seems to be paying off (see more on that below);

Boeing (Mesa, Arizona), the aerospace titan that builds the Army’s AH-64 Apache and CH-47 Chinook;

Karem Aircraft (Lake Forest, California), known for innovative designs and small-scale projects but not mass production;

Sikorsky (Stratford, Connecticut), a Lockheed subsidiary that builds the current UH-60 Black Hawk and is now developing radically innovative compound helicopter designs.

Skyworks Global and Scaled Composites will offer their VertiJet gyrodyne aircraft for one of the US Army's various Future Vertical Lift (FVL) competitions, according to an executive.

John Michel, Skyworks Global executive director and retired US Air Force (USAF) brigadier general, told Jane's on 9 July that VertiJet can fulfill a variety of military missions including combat search and rescue (CSAR); ship-to-shore logistics; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); armed escort, and special operations. While the US Army has an active competition in Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft-Competitive Prototype (FARA-CP) and a potential competition for Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), Michel said the team had not determined which competition, or competitions, to pursue.

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The only hint of its plans came from the CEO of Textron, Bell’s parent company, who said during an earnings call that the FARA design would be based on its 525 technology rather than its tiltrotor design like the V-280.

The company revealed Oct. 1 at its Arlington, Virginia, office the Bell 360 Invictus, which is based on 525 technology, but with several key differences, including its size in order to adhere to the Army requirement of 40-foot in diameter rotor blades.

texl1649 wrote:

And now we have the Bell 360 Invictus as their ‘official’ entrant. It appears to be a relatively low risk entrant, which given Bell’s record with proposals for attack helicopters to the US Army since the AH-1 is unsurprising.

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/1 ... -aircraft/

The only hint of its plans came from the CEO of Textron, Bell’s parent company, who said during an earnings call that the FARA design would be based on its 525 technology rather than its tiltrotor design like the V-280.

The company revealed Oct. 1 at its Arlington, Virginia, office the Bell 360 Invictus, which is based on 525 technology, but with several key differences, including its size in order to adhere to the Army requirement of 40-foot in diameter rotor blades.

texl1649 wrote:

That's a million dollar question, Jay #14.

I would think the 20,000 pound class Kamov KA-50 series has proven it can be done (using 2 ea. 2,400 shp engines). For a co-axial attack scout model, it's comparatively crude to the Sikorsky, and 20 years older at least, but it hasn't seemed to lead to a lot of reliability concerns.

Still, the S-69/SH-59 goes back a long ways too with Sikorsky/the US Army (50 years at least). I'd think they understand the limits/practicality of the basic design elements at this point if they're that invested in it. (Karem might be another issue).

The AR40 aircraft has a 12.2m (40ft) wingspan – wider than the helicopter’s 11m main rotor diameter. The wing can provide the majority of the aircraft’s lift and tilts upwards during the helicopter’s descent or ascent in order to make its vertical flight more aerodynamic.

The AR40 also has a swiveling tail rotor, which in forward flight is angled backwards to be used as a pusher propeller. The company says in forward flight the aircraft’s vertical stabiliser compensates for torque from the main rotor blades. The swiveling tail rotor should allow for the aircraft “to manoeuvre aggressively at low speeds,” says Karem.

The AR40’s cockpit has room for two pilots sitting side-by-side. It also has a small cabin directly behind the cockpit with room for four passengers, such as special operations troops. Behind the cabin is the rotorcraft’s internal weapons bay.

Schloesser said he was “aware of the Lockheed Martin facility” when he began developing Bell’s AVLC. “I thought it was state of the art at the time, and I wanted to go beyond that,” he said. “My inspiration came from our museums. If you go to some of our museums, either the Air and Space Museum, African American Museum, the Native American Museum, you go through experiences. It’s no longer the old museum experience where you have a dead thing on the wall and ‘oh by the way, that died 2,000 years ago.’” Those modern museums were “an inspiration, for sure, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.

Boeing declined my request to visit a room they use for customer briefings in a big Crystal City office they opened in 2014, but possibly there wouldn’t have been much to see. Schloesser said Boeing “chose to do other things with [their] facility. It’s more of an office space and a meeting center.” Bell’s AVLC, meanwhile, though just a year and a half old, is paying off, Schloesser said.

“What it has done is, allowed us to play a constructive role with the Army, the Marine Corps, and the Office of Secretary of Defense in deciding to accelerate the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program,” he said. “It was actually really not going to come to fruition for first unit equipped until about 2035. We showed them the realm of what is doable and now they want to accelerate by about four and a half years to five years, up to 2030 for first unit equipped.”