Ongoing work on the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) tiltrotor is helping the U.S. Navy refine its next-generation Future Vertical Lift-Maritime Strike (FVL-MS) plans. FVL-MS is set to be a family of systems with crewed and uncrewed components to succeed the Navy’s existing MH-60R and MH-60S Seahawks, as well as its MQ-8C Fire Scout drone helicopters.
Navy Rear Adm. Michael “Buzz” Donnelly, head of the Air Warfare Division within the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, provided new details about FVL-MS to TWZ and other outlets on the sidelines of the Navy League’s Sea Air Space 2025 exhibition yesterday. The Army is currently working toward fielding a fleet of FLRAA aircraft derived from Bell’s V-280 Valor design, which will replace a significant portion of the service’s H-60 Black Hawk fleets.
The Navy has 270 MH-60Rs and 256 MH-60Ss in inventory, according to NAVAIR’s website, but it is unclear whether those figures are current. At present, the service expects to fly both types at least deep into the 2030s. The Navy is already moving to retire all its still-young MQ-8Cs, which have struggled with various issues before and after reaching initial operational capability in 2019.
Collectively, MH-60R/S helicopters currently perform a wide range of missions, including anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures, electronic warfare support, combat search and rescue, assault, and vertical replenishment. The MQ-8C was envisioned primarily as an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform, particularly to help Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) with targeting at extended ranges, but that might also have been adapted for other roles.
The planned replacement FVL-MS “is a family of systems. We foresee that to be both a manned platform partnering with an unmanned capability,” Donnelly said. Whether the concept is close to the Army’s FLRAA “or another type of design is still being evaluated in concept development.”
“We’ll definitely continue to leverage what we are already teamed with the Army [on] for FLRAA. Certainly not going to miss an opportunity to take advantage of what they’ve already developed,” he continued. “We’ve got different space and environmental factors in terms of operating from sea, operating from a combined flight deck, that won’t allow us to use the exact type of air vehicle they were looking at, but they have done a lot of very good work that we can continue to leverage.”
Donnelly noted that the Navy has a requirement for two FVL-MS aircraft to fit aboard any one “CRUDES” – short for cruiser and destroyer type ships like the service’s existing Ticonderoga and Arleigh Burke classes – as well as its Freedom and Independence class LCS and future Constellation class frigates. Seahawks also currently operate from other Navy ships, including aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships, expeditionary sea base vessels, and command ships. In addition to needing to account for limited physical space, designing aircraft for protracted operations from sea-based platforms brings along other inherent requirements, including measures to mitigate saltwater corrosion.
“Specifically, you know, the [FLRAA] air vehicle, the mechanics, and kinetic performance of that is interesting,” the rear admiral added. “What’s most interesting is the combat system, the ability to integrate unmanned systems from the design up.”
“The [FVL-MS] program is informed by the Army and Marine Corps advances in improved engine design, digital backbone, Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA), advanced rotor blades, materials and launched effects,” the Navy has also said in the past.
As TWZ has highlighted many times in the past, increased range, as well as greater speed to cover those distances faster, were key considerations for the Army when it picked Bell’s V-280-based design as the winner of the FLRAA competition. The Army has also been very outspoken in touting FLRAA’s open-architecture mission systems, which will make it easier to integrate new and improved capabilities and functionality down the line.
For the Army, the performance boost that FLRAA offers will be particularly critical in any future operations across the vast expanses of the Indo-Pacific region, especially a potential high-end fight against China. These are similarly important considerations for the Navy, which has to contend with the added complexity of conducting aviation operations from ships at sea that could be thousands of miles from friendly or hostile shores. Extending the operational reach of friendly forces is only set to become more important as the range of potential threats also increases.
“The threat paradigm in the 2030-2035 timeframe — as well as the principles of DMO [Distributed Maritime Operations] — dictate that FVL (MS) be able to conduct these tasks in a highly contested environment, at greater ranges, and with greater speed, endurance and precision,” the Navy previously laid out in its Naval Aviation Vision 2030-2035 document. “FVL (MS) will leverage advances in AI and ML [artificial intelligence and machine learning] sensor technology, AI and ML to fully integrate the manned and unmanned platforms to form highly effective teams, thereby reducing operator workload and increasing the speed and quality of aircrew decision-making.”
This, together with Donnelly’s comments yesterday about the Navy being particularly interested in what the Army is doing with FLRAA when it comes to teaming with uncrewed platforms, underscores just how important vertical takeoff and landing capable drones that can perform a variety of missions are to the FVL-MS plan. A crewed-uncrewed team with extended reach could be particularly useful for anti-submarine warfare missions, something TWZ has highlighted in the past.
Overall, “FVL (MS) will be the most widely distributed aviation platform in the Navy embarking on all surface combatants from future FFG to aircraft carriers and will contribute to more primary mission areas than any other aviation platform in the Navy,” Donnelly had said last May. That month, the Navy announced the FVL-MS program had completed an analysis of alternatives (AoA) and was moving on to the development of a Capabilities Development Document (CDD) to firm up core requirements, as well as associated concepts of operations (CONOPS).
For its part, Bell has pitched a navalized derivative of the V-280 tiltrotor in the past, as well as maritime strike and anti-submarine warfare configurations of its companion uncrewed V-247 Vigilant design, to the Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps. The Marines say they are also following the FLRAA program closely to see what could be leveraged in their search for a new Next Generation Assault Support (NGAS) aircraft to succeed the MV-22B Osprey tiltrotor.
Tiltrotors, in general, offer substantial advantages in terms of speed, range, and maximum operating altitude over traditional helicopters. However, they have not seen widespread adoption globally by armed forces or in the commercial sector due to historically high costs and complexities associated with the designs. The V-22, though currently in service with the Navy, Marines, and U.S. Air Force, has been and remains a very controversial aircraft with a checkered service record punctuated by numerous fatal crashes. This includes the loss of an Air Force CV-22B in 2023 off the coast of Japan that triggered a three-month-long grounding of virtually all Ospreys worldwide, the fallout from which is still being felt.
It is worth noting that tilt-rotors do also present particular challenges for shipboard operations when it comes to the aforementioned space requirements. The Osprey features a folding main wing and rotors to help reduce its physical footprint. Adding such features to a design that does not include them from the start could be a complicated proposition. Models of the V-247 have been shown with a similar folding main wing and rotor arrangement to the V-22.
Advanced compound helicopter designs like the SB>1 Defiant that lost to the V-280 in the FLRAA competition are still another pathway to increases in range and speed. At the same time, they bring their own costs and complexities, and still have generally lower overall performance than comparable tiltrotor designs.
Back in February, a Navy contracting notice also highlighted the service’s potential interest in a new Service Life Modernization (SLM) effort for the MH-60R/S Seahawk fleets, which could entail “a collection of efforts with intended competitive space that will result in an extensive re-architecture and modernization of the MH-60R/MH-60S cockpit avionics and mission systems using a Modular Open System Approach.”
The full scale and scope of the proposed SLM plan remains unclear. Sikorsky, now a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, developed a common digital cockpit architecture for the MH-60R and MH-60S variants decades ago. The Navy has also been looking at a separate Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) for the MH-60S specifically, and primarily to address airframe fatigue, since at least 2022, according to official budget documents. The Navy is already pursuing a number of other Seahawk modernization efforts, including engine improvements and communication suite upgrades, as well.
As already discussed in the context of FLRAA, installing new open-architecture avionics and other mission systems onto the MH-60R/Ss would help simplify the process of adding updated functionality to the Navy Seahawks across the rest of their remaining service life. This might also provide another bridge, at least in part, to capabilities for FVL-MS.
It’s also worth noting that the cost of replacing all of the Navy’s MH-60R/S helicopters with new FVL-MS aircraft could be very steep. Like the Army, the Navy could decide to operate a hybrid fleet that retains a number of Seahawks for the foreseeable future.
What we do know is that the Navy is actively leveraging elements of the Army’s FLRAA program to help push ahead toward its future FVL-MS family of systems.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com