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?”
The MH-60Ms that special operations FLRAAs are set to replace are absolutely jam-packed with systems not found on standard UH-60Ms, including a nose-mounted radar, additional sensors, defensive systems, and communications gear. They also have an inflight refueling probe not found on regular Army Black Hawks. You can read more about what goes into the last special operations Black Hawks here.
“So we did an engineering analysis, which is now turned into the detailed design on that,” Keogh added. The Army’s FLRAA program manager and the service’s Program Executive Office for Aviation (PEO-Aviation) “took our engineering analysis with the initial cuts at the detailed design. They looked at it, they looked at the weight trades – it did add a little bit of weight to the baseline of that aircraft – but they said, ‘Hey, this buys us future growth capability for mission equipment, as well,’ and they inserted those into the baseline aircraft.”
The Army has already made clear that the production FLRAA design will differ substantially from Bell’s V-280 demonstrator, which has been flying since 2017. The service has also talked about pushing to lay the groundwork now to make the integration of new and improved capabilities down the line easier.
Now, “every FLRAA that gets built for fielding is going to have the provisions for us to put our things on the aircraft, which is a huge cost reduction for us when it comes time to field the [160th Special Operations Aviation] Regiment. So that was a huge win,” Keogh said. “Again, we’re in lockstep with the Army on that one. We’re not – we can’t move ahead of them. There’s no way for us to accelerate that program. They’re doing a great job with it.”
Keogh added that his office is also working to take special operations-unique software in use now on 160th helicopters and see what of it might be adaptable to work with FLRAA’s mission systems. A key area of focus for the Army with FLRAA has already been modular and open-architecture systems to help speed up the introduction of new functionality in the future.
“We have a unique avionics suite to the [160th Special Operations Aviation] Regiment. It’s common between the big aircraft [the MH-60M and MH-47G Chinook]. The user is very happy with it. It’s got great functionality. They’ve been developing it for 20-plus years now,” he explained. “We’re working to pull some of those software bits out, turn them into applications that we can then put into the FLRAA computing environment, so we can still have the same stuff that we use in CAS, the common avionics architecture” without having to “pull all those boxes out [and] put our own cockpit in there.”
The process Keogh outlined for converting baseline FLRAAs into special operations versions is fundamentally different from how MH-60Ms are converted from UH-60Ms today, not to mention simpler. The resulting helicopter is also substantially different, right down to its core structure, from the standard M variant of the Black Hawk.
“You fly a good Black Hawk, a good Army UH-60M Black Hawk, up to SOFSA [the Special Operations Forces Support Activity in Lexington, Kentucky], and then we take it completely apart,” he explained. “We fly at higher gross weights, because we have a ton of mission equipment to do the things – to give the operators the capability to do the things they need to do.”
“All that mission equipment adds weight to the airframe. So we had to do a lot of structural modifications to increase our gross weight, so we can still offer a suitable payload to carry the operators where they need to go,” he continued. “And then we ran into the problem, now we’ve got this really heavy aircraft, the engines only make so much power, so we’ve got bigger engines. We run the YT-706. YT because it’s not fully qualified, but it’s a very qualified engine. … it’s one of the things that we do here, is we are able to accept a higher level of risk in order to provide capability for our users. Highly trained users, the best pilots in the world, they can manage that risk.”
“So we do that, rip it apart, all the structural mods, we’ve got the engines, we put the SOF [special operations forces] peculiar” systems in, “and then the last thing we do is paint it black.”
It’s not hard to see how making changes to FLRAA’s basic design to streamline this process could pay serious dividends. As Keogh noted, ‘Big Army’ could also leverage the trade space now baked into the design to add in additional capabilities to meet its own needs.
FLRAA is already set to completely change how the conventional Army conducts air assaults thanks to its substantially greater range and speed compared to the Black Hawk. The service has been targeting a top speed of at least 250 knots (285 miles per hour), and potentially up to 280 knots (320 miles per hour), and an unrefueled combat radius of between 200 and 300 nautical miles for its new tiltrotor. A typical current-generation Black Hawk flying under normal operating conditions can get up to a top speed of 163 knots (187.5 miles per hour) and fly 268 nautical miles without needing to refuel, according to Lockheed Martin, the parent company of the helicopter’s manufacturer Sikorsky.
The speed and range of the FLRAA would be particularly important in any future conflict in the Pacific region, where initial launch points – on land or at sea – and operating areas could easily be very far apart. Those capabilities could also be very valuable for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which is regularly called upon to conduct especially challenging long-duration missions in unforgiving environments, typically at night. A prime example of this in the Regiment’s relatively recent history is the famous raid in Pakistan that led to the death of Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden.
The Army had said in the past that its goal was to begin fielding the baseline FLRAA variant by 2030, but just this week the service disclosed it is now looking to accelerate that timeline to 2028. Army officials have also pushed back on the possibility of the program being canceled as part of a massive U.S. military-wide review of priorities. The service is looking to make major cuts to a host of programs, some of which it is now moving to axe entirely, as part of a larger force restructuring effort.
With the work it has been doing with the Army on FLRAA in the meantime, SOCOM is laying the groundwork for getting special operations versions of the tiltrotor into service as quickly as possible once the baseline variants begin being fielded.
Special thanks to FlightGlobal’s Ryan Finnerty for providing audio of the PEO-RW session from the SOF Week conference.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com