S97 Raider and JMR/FVL program News + Videos

Jura said:

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one would've thought the crash had been a success LOL!

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Lockheed Martin-owned

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— an experimental coaxial helicopter — is on the edge of returning to flight after

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took out its first prototype.

The company had a second Raider prototype standing by, so following the accident, Sikorsky began to ready that aircraft for flight.

The second aircraft began ground testing on April 25 at the company’s West Palm Beach, Florida, facility, Tim Malia, Sikorsky’s program director for Future Vertical Lift light development, told Defense News at the Army Aviation Association of America annual summit.

“We are eager to go into and complete a whole ground test cycle,” Malia said, adding that it will result in getting the helicopter into the air this summer, where the company will pick up where it left off with the first aircraft.

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, the company had been able to complete low-speed handling, and in 20 hours of flight testing it expanded the speed envelope to 150 knots.

During this summer, Malia said, Sikorsky aims to push the speed above 200 knots.

While the company has been careful not to sacrifice flight safety as it brings the new prototype into flight testing, “there is an element that goes a little bit faster” since the aircraft preparing to fly isn’t the first one, Malia explained. Sikorsky was able to more quickly build it, he said, and the company will be able to move through some initial testing faster.

Findings of the cause of the hard landing had nothing to do with Sikorsky’s X2 coaxial technology used both in Raider and its

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the company is building with Boeing for the Army’s Joint Multi-Role demonstration, which will help define requirements for a Future Vertical Lift aircraft expected to fly in the 2030s.

“The neighborhood of the root cause is the complex interaction between the ground, the landing gear, the flight control system and the associated pilot interactions,” Chris Van Buiten, Sikorsky’s vice president of technology and innovation, said in response to a National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report issued in September.

The findings required Sikorsky to make some changes to the flight-control system software to assure the same thing will never happen again, Van Buiten said.

Sikorsky is hoping the U.S. Army will choose Raider for its FVL light aircraft that will serve the attack reconnaissance mission. The service has not yet indicated how and when it will

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.

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Army’s Future Vertical Lift team working out how to get a helo within a decade
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  1 day ago

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that falls under the service’s new

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has a goal of getting a new helicopter much earlier than the long-stated projection of fielding an aircraft in the early 2030s.
The Army secretary has essentially directed the new CFT designed to address the service’s third-highest modernization priority to look at ways to buy helicopters within 10 years, Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, the leader of the FVL CFT, said at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual summit on April 27.
“If we wait for a typical capability development, we are looking at the 2030s, and that is not my charge,” Rugen said. “The secretary told us this decade.”
The Army is now weighing when and how it will procure two specific helicopters. It’s possible the Army will develop requirements for other aircraft that would fit into an FVL family, but for now the service is focusing on a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft that would be categorized as a light helicopter and a Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft that would fit more in a medium-lift category.
Service leadership has been peppered with questions — since it articulated its intentions last month to focus on the two aircraft — as to whether it wants to first procure the attack reconnaissance or a long-range assault aircraft. Previously the Army was focused on prioritizing the medium-lift variant. But at the same time it consistently stated its No. 1 capability gap was armed reconnaissance.
But for the Army, the answer isn’t clear cut: It’s still analyzing all the possibilities. Leadership has explained that what will drive procurement, and when, will be based on when technology is ready at a reasonable cost.
“It’s not a prioritization thing,” Rugen said. “It’s where we find opportunity first.”
He added that industry has already shown great agility to bring something out of science and technology and, quite literally, into the sky rapidly through the

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that will inform FVL requirements. Bell is already flying its

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, and the

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will fly by the end of the year.
If something proves capable, the Army will jump on it, Rugen said, because “it gives us the speed we want.”
Meanwhile, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville took the opportunity at the Army Aviation Association of America event to ask the Army National Guard to provide leadership to the FVL team as the service develops its future aircraft.
“We are going to be a part of that and be right there in the decision-making for a new-start program and making sure that our capabilities are accounted for,” Brig. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the Army National Guard’s deputy commanding general at the Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker, Alabama, said at AAAA. “One of the things that the vice [chief of staff] pointed out is that FVL will not adversely affect [the Guard].”

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Jura said:

Sep 18, 2017
and now S-97 Raider on the edge of returning to flight following last year’s crash

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Sikorsky’s

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— an experimental coaxial helicopter — has met the required objectives to move forward into its full flight test program with its second prototype after the first aircraft was sidelined following

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, according to the company’s vice president for Future Vertical Lift.

The second aircraft

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at the company’s West Palm Beach, Florida, facility.

Operating the Raider for 90 minutes June 19, pilots Bill Fell and John Groth completed the flight test card, marking a “significant milestone” that will allow Sikorsky to proceed with its full flight test program, Dan Spoor told Defense News in a June 20 statement.

“We look forward to demonstrating to the U.S. military that high flight speed and extraordinary maneuverability in the hover and low speed regimes will dramatically change the way that military aviators fly and fight with helicopters,” he said.

The plans to get back into the test program appear to be happening on schedule. Sikorsky was shooting to get the helicopter back in the air in the summer and pick up where it left off with its first aircraft.

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, the company had been able to complete low speed handling, and in 20 hours of flight testing, it expanded the speed envelope to 150 knots.

This summer, the plan is to push the speed above 200 knots, which is the next step in achieving speeds well over that benchmark.

Sikorsky believes it has solved the problem that caused the first prototype’s hard landing.

The first hard landing had nothing to do with Sikorsky’s X2 coaxial technology used both in Raider and its

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the company is building with Boeing for the Army’s Joint Multi-Role demonstration which will help define requirements for a Future Vertical Lift aircraft expected to fly in the 2030s.

Defiant is expected to fly by the end of the year.

“The neighborhood of the root cause is the complex interaction between the ground, the landing gear, the flight control system and the associated pilot interactions,” Chris Van Buiten, Sikorsky’s vice president of technology and innovation, said in response to a National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report issued in September 2017.

The findings required Sikorsky to make some changes to the flight-control system software to assure the same thing will never happen again, Van Buiten said.

Sikorsky is hoping the U.S. Army will choose Raider for its

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The service has not yet indicated how and when it will procure a new helicopter that meets such a mission.

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WASHINGTON: The

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, a high-speed helicopter aimed at

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in major wars, won’t make its first flight this year after all. Unspecified but “minor” issues discovered in ground tests will push first flight back “two or three weeks,” co-developers Sikorsky and Boeing said this morning.

Meanwhile, the other contender for the Future Vertical Lift aircraft, Bell’s

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, will celebrate a year of flight tests next Tuesday. That reflects, at least in par, a fundamental difference in approach. While Bell’s V-280 uses tiltrotor technology, proven in widespread service on the V-22 Osprey since

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, the Defiant uses Sikorsky’s revolutionary

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technology, which

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— but which has only actually flown in two experimental aircraft, the

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and

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, both of which are much smaller than Defiant.Defiant and Valor are both candidates for the mid-sized FVL variant, what the Army now calls the

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(FLRAA, pronounced “flora”). The Army wants to start building the new assault aircraft ASAP to replace its UH-60 Black Hawks. The UH-60 is a Cold War design that’s been the workhorse in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it lacks the speed and range that military futurists think will be required to

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like Russia’s or China’s. (The Army’s also urgently looking for a

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, the

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, and there the leading contender is Sikorsky’s S-97, which is smaller than Defiant and already in flight testing).
After fixing some “minor” issues discovered during ground tests, the SB>1 will still fly early next year, in plenty of time to provide data to the Army for its ongoing Analysis Of Alternatives, the company officials told reporters. The Defiant and Valor are technically only Joint Multi-Role demonstrators, not competing Future Vertical Lift prototypes, but the Army wants to start a program of record in 2021 and the demonstration phase is widely viewed as a

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.

So when would be too late for first flight? “We haven’t come up with a date that, ‘oh my goodness, if we haven’t flown by this, this time, we’re too late,'” said Randy Rotte, Boeing’s director of cargo aircraft and FVL. “We’ve been really focused on…when we have to have the data to them, which is somewhat fuzzy and open-ended because the Army’s been willing to accept (test data) over a longer period of time.” The crucial data, of course, will come from flight testing: “We’re working with the Army now on how long we’ll be able to do that,” Rotte said.
What’s been the issue? It is notpreviously reported problems with the transmission gearbox or rotors, Rotte said. “The good news is, for all intents and purposes, for everything we know, those issues are behind us,” he said. “They were both about manufacturing; they were not about necessarily design.” The gears turned out not to be quite hard enough, so they had to be reground. The unusually long, stiff rotor blades a compound helicopter requires — to achieve high speeds without the crippling vibrations a conventional chopper would encounter — proved “a bigger challenge” than expected to manufacture with the existing tools.

The modified transmission has “been through all its testing (and) passed with flying colors,” Rotte said. The blades have been running in ground tests since last month: “We haven’t seen anything yet that would be an issue or a problem. So far so good, I’m knocking on wood when I say this.”Whatever the latest issue was, it only appeared when the companies put all the components together and ran them in their Power System Test Bed (PSTB), essentially a copy of the Defiant aircraft that’s bolted to the ground.
“We’ve had a couple of runs on the PSTB,” said Rich Koucheravy, FVL director. for Sikorsky (now

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). “The initial two, three runs, we did have some minor discovery. I won’t get into the nature of the discovery, (but) it’s a relatively mundane thing that has to be fixed.”

“We expect these sorts of things to come up when you run a configuration stand for the first time,” Koucheravy said. “That’s the purpose of building the PSTB.” No amount of component-by-component testing or computer modeling can predict all the interactions when you put everything together and turn it on, particularly vibration and heating. But traditionally, you don’t discover those issues until you’ve got the first prototype in ground tests. By building the Power System Test Bed and running it even as the actual aircraft was still under construction, Koucheravy argued, you can find and fix the inevitable problems earlier.

The changes are being made to both the testbed and the Defiant aircraft itself, Koucheravy and Randy said, which is taking about “two to three weeks.” Then the testbed will be back in operation and the Defiant will be starting its first-ever ground tests.

So first flight will likewise be delayed two or three weeks, into early 2019 — assuming no further surprises. “That would be great,” Rotte said. “I’m not sure if that would happen or not.”

The companies could have kludged together something sooner, “a quick fix to get up in the air,” Koucheravy said. “That’s not the type of development work

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.”

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timepass said:

The Sikorsky S-97 Raider light tactical prototype helicopter exceeded 200 knots ( 370km/h) during last month’s flight test. The suite of X2 Technologies enables the aircraft to operate at high speeds while maintaining the low-speed handling qualities and maneuverability of conventional single main rotor helicopters.

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Air Force Brat said:

Over 200 knts at present... that is "smoking" right along.

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anzha said:

Does anyone know if there's historical data for all the aircraft trackers in the US?

I was told the V-280 did over 250 kts based on what was on one of the sites. Bell hasn't said anything though. So. hmm?

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anzha said:

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I was told the V-280 did over 250 kts based on what was on one of the sites. Bell hasn't said anything though. So. hmm?

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A year on from its first flight, Bell’s V-280 Valor advanced tiltrotor demonstrator is closing in on its speed goal of at least 280 kt.

The aircraft has reached 250 kt. true airspeed and continues to expand the flight envelope in areas such as bank angle, load factor and low-speed agility.

“Since December 18, 2017, we have made good progress in demonstrating a low-risk, more-affordable tiltrotor for the [U.S. Army’s] Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft [FLRAA],” says Ryan Ehinger, Bell’s V-280 program manager.

The V-280 is one of two aircraft built under the Army’s Joint Multi Role (JMR) program, which is demonstrating technology for FLRAA—also known as Future Vertical Lift Capability Set 3. First flight of the rival

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/

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SB-1 Defiant has slipped into 2019.

After a year of testing, the V-280 has logged more than 82 hr. of flight and 180 hr. of rotor turn time, including ground runs and taxiing. “The aircraft is very reliable. We’ve had no real issues,” Ehinger says.

In two flights over two days in September totaling more than 730 mi., including ferrying the V-280 from Bell’s assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, to its test center in Arlington, Texas, “We demonstrated a long-range cruise speed for most efficient flight of more than 220 knots,” he says.

“We have been authorized by engineering to expand on that and we hope to hit 240 knots indicated airspeed [280 kt. true air speed] on our next flights,” says Jeff Josselyn, V-280 flight maintenance manager. The target speed of 280 kt. will be at 80% proprotor speed, the most efficient rpm for cruise.

Bell believes the tiltrotor’s greater speed and range capability compared with a helicopter will be a key competitive advantage if the Army launches a FLRAA program of record—a decision scheduled for 2021.

“We still have the high-speed milestone ahead—280 knots—but all the data indicates that will happen. Within the speed envelope we have expanded sideways, collecting angle-of-bank and other engineering data to calibrate our analytical tools,” Ehinger says.

Bell is using the V-280 to calibrate and correlate its design tools “so that when we create the FLRAA it is low risk,” he says, adding “The models are lining up well.”

A unique aspect of Bell’s JMR demo is the need to show the V-280’s low-speed agility is sufficient to enable a tiltrotor to replace a helicopter, as FLRAA is intended to replace the Army’s

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Black Hawk and

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’ Bell

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Venom.

For pitch and yaw control at low speed, a tiltrotor relies on blade flapping to change the direction of the thrust vectors on its two rotors. Compared with those on the

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, the V-280’s rotors have more than 50% more flapping capability, Ehinger says.

Added blade flapping is demonstrating extra controllability, Josselyn says, citing the aircraft’s ability to perform pirouettes, quick starts and stops, and turns on the spot. “There is always room for improvement, but the data are showing we have the right recipe and we are continuing to refine it,” he says.

Flight testing is also continuing to fill out the conversion corridor, the range of airspeeds and rotor pylon angles at which the V-280 can convert between vertical and horizontal flight.

Bell is adding software capability incrementally, testing it on the ground in the system integration laboratory before flying it in the aircraft. “The feedback from the pilots is the aircraft matches the simulator, but they are not prepared for the acceleration when it converts,” Ehinger says.

Army pilots are scheduled to fly in the V-280 again over the next few days, Josselyn said during a media tour of the Arlington test center on Dec. 11. An Army test pilot and a U.S. government senior test pilot are due to fly the tiltrotor.

In February, the Army test pilot became the first pilot from the services to fly the aircraft. A former H-60 pilot with no V-22 stick time, he successfully put the V-280 in a stable hover and “was extremely pleased with the performance he saw,” Josselyn says.

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Here’s the first look at the Sikorsky-Boeing Defiant helicopter
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  4 hours ago

Sikorsky and Boeing provided the first look at the new Defiant helicopter, one of two designs participating in the Army’s Joint Multi-Role-Medium Technology Demonstrator Program. (Courtesy Sikorsky-Boeing Team)



WASHINGTON — Sikorsky and Boeing provided the first look at the Defiant helicopter, one of two designs competing under the U.S. Army’s Joint Multi-Role technology demonstrator program, two weeks after

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The Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator effort will inform requirements for the U.S. Army’s FVL family of systems, which will come online in the 2030s.

Sikorsky and Boeing provided the first look at the new Defiant helicopter. The aircraft’s rotor system will allow it to fly about twice as fast and twice as far as today’s conventional helicopters. (Courtesy Sikorsky-Boeing Team)
The Defiant is designed to fly at twice the speed and range of today’s conventional helicopters and offers advanced agility and maneuverability, according to the Sikorsky-Boeing team. Data from the Defiant will help the Army develop requirements for new utility helicopters expected to enter service in the early 2030s.

The Defiant’s first flight was bumped to 2019 following a technical issue discovered during ground tests. Competitor Bell’s

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has been flying since December 2017.

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