The Army doesn’t only want much faster aircraft: It wants them to cost the same to build, operate, and maintain as its current helicopters. Otherwise it can’t fit them into an unchanging aviation budget. That’s an awfully high bar.

One variant, in Army colors, has missile racks sticking out of what was originally the passenger cabin — a conversion that units could potentially install or remove as needed in the field. The other, with Marine Corps markings, is a sleeker thoroughbred gunship with internal weapons bays, stealth features, and folding wings to fit in shipboard hangars.

The Army’s new emphasis on armed recon could potentially disrupt the all-service Future Vertical Lift project (FVL).

All this technology serves a new concept of operations for defeating dense advanced air defenses of the kind Russia and China are both building for themselves and selling abroad.

AUSA: Bell Helicopter is moving right along with its new V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor being built under the Army-led, multiservice Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program. The V-280 – which flies at 280 knots cruising speed — resembles the bigger V-22 Osprey built by Bell and Boeing for the Marine Corps, Air Force Special Operations Command… Keep reading →

Bell’s V-280 tiltrotor didn’t take flight – not yet – but it has tilted its rotors into helicopter mode and spun them up during its first-ever “restrained ground run test.” This test mode plugs the whole aircraft into a bulky apparatus to ensure it doesn’t take off by accident. (That would be bad). The test… Keep reading →

AMARILLO, TEX.: The Future Vertical Lift program aims to create revolutionary replacements for today’s military helicopters. But how? And why? The answers lie in the speed limits built into the physics of how a helicopter flies. Rival contractors Bell and Sikorsky (part of Lockheed Martin) both say they have transcended those limits to build dramatically… Keep reading →

A bevy of new vertical take off and landing (VTOL) aircraft conceived to take the military beyond the speed, range and altitude limits of helicopters are scheduled to fly over the next two years. None looks more like science fiction becoming science fact than a sort of flying candy crane formerly known as “Transformer.” What is now… Keep reading →

AUSA: Bell Helicopter’s exhibit at this week’s Association of the United States Army convention includes a full-scale mockup of the V-280 Valor, the new tiltrotor the company is building. From the outside, it sure looks like a close cousin of the V-22 Osprey. Under the skin, the V-280 seems a lot more like a prop-driven F-35. The… Keep reading →

AUSA: As a rule of thumb, the aerodynamics of rotor blades limit helicopters to top cruising speeds well under 200 mph, but Sikorsky and Boeing are building an aircraft they promise will thumb its nose at that rule. It’s a compound helicopter – two coaxial rotors and a pusher propeller – that they promise will… Keep reading →