HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Bell [TXT] is currently working through the preliminary design review (PDR) for the Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), a company official confirmed, with the program on track for a Milestone B decision this summer to move into the Engineering, Manufacturing and Development (EMD) phase.
“We’re in the throes right now of working through the preliminary design review. That’s all going well. The Army’s taking us to task, as they should as a customer and we appreciate that. And we have a program team that’s executing very well right now through that PDR process,” Carl Coffman, Bell’s vice president of military sales and strategy, told
Defense Daily during an interview at last week’s AUSA Global Force Symposium here.
Bell’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor aircraft was named the winner of the FLRAA competition in December 2022, beating out a Sikorsky [LMT] and Boeing [BA] team’s Defiant X coaxial rigid rotor helicopter offering for the program to find an eventual UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter replacement (Defense Daily, Dec. 5 2022).
The Army’s initial FLRAA deal to Bell is worth up to $1.3 billion but could total $7 billion if all options are picked up.
“Fundamentally, what you’re doing [with PDR] is almost like defending a doctoral thesis,” Coffman said. “It’s bringing the proof that you are where you are in the maturity of the program. And that informs the back and forth between the government customer and our team leads and program managers that we are where we say we are. And if we’re not, it [highlights] where we need to shore up. If someone has a question or they’re not quite comfortable with something, there’s a lot of discussion to make sure that we are getting done what we need to get done. So it’s a grueling process, but it’s a process that has to be done.”
Coffman also addressed the Army’s decision to cancel development of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), which had Bell competing against Sikorsky to build prototypes (Defense Daily, Feb. 8).
“We were, frankly, a little disappointed about that. But, it is what it is. The customer made an adjustment, so we’ll adjust as well,” Coffman said. “The Army has decided there are significant lessons learned from Ukraine about the survivability of rotorcraft. We get it. We completely agree, there are some lessons to be learned there.”
Along with citing how “unmanned, joint, and space-based assets [could] do the mission originally envisioned for the FARA aircraft,” Army officials told lawmakers last month concerns over the industrial base impacts associated with the potential shuttering of its UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook helicopter lines in the coming years also informed the FARA cancellation decision (Defense Daily, March 7).
The Army had spent $2 billion to date on developing FARA, with officials telling lawmakers during the House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee hearing last month that lessons learned from the program would not go to “waste” and would be applied to future aviation priorities and upgrade efforts.
“Don’t consider it a total bust, right, because there were a lot of things learned in that process. A development program like [FARA] is more than just an air vehicle program, right? It’s about mission systems integration. We learned a lot in proving out the [Modular Open Systems Architecture] (MOSA),” Coffman told Defense Daily. “We learned a lot about manufacturing and operating in a digital environment. It was another iteration for us and the government to operate in a digital design environment. With our advanced manufacturing techniques, we learned a lot there as well. And we learned a lot about integrating launched effects and the plan for integrating launched effects.”
Paul Wilson, Bell’s program manager for FLRAA, previously told Defense Daily that achieving a Milestone B decision in the third quarter of fiscal year 2024 as planned to move into an official program of record would likely set up first flight for FLRAA in the “mid-2020’s” and first unit equipped in the early 2030’s (Defense Daily, Oct. 11 2023).
Coffman said last week Bell will likely have a better sense of the timeline for future activities after getting through the PDR process and following the Milestone B decision.
“When we get [through PDR], we want to be very thorough in that because we want to have a solid base foundation to start from when we get to Milestone B and those activities,” Coffman said.
The Army in late November held its first solder touchpoint for FLRAA, with Coffman confirming a couple such events have been conducted with more planned to continue informing design priorities (Defense Daily, Jan. 17).
“Those soldiers can go in there and inform us about seat height and width and seat positions. We put pilots in the cockpit. And we can look at all those human factors and get informed from the operator level. Because, in the end, we want to put the best product we can put out there for the warfighter,” Coffman said.
Bell announced last September that GE Aerospace [GE] is developing the “Common Open Architecture Digital Backbone” for FLRAA to support rapid integration of new capabilities on the platform (Defense Daily, Sept. 7).
Last month, Bell also opened its its new Weapon Systems Integration Lab (WSIL) in Arlington, Texas, which it said “will aid in the safe, rapid and efficient integration and test of a next generation fly-by-wire tiltrotor and mission systems using a modular open systems approach for the Army’s Future Long- Range Assault Aircraft” (Defense Daily, March 15).
“We’ll be able to bring in suppliers and teammates, their systems and capabilities, onto the architecture of the aircraft prior to having an aircraft built. So that just allows us to stay ahead. It allows us to prove that we’re MOSA compliant,” Coffman said last week.