V-280 & other current (non V-22) Tilt Rotor Aircraft

Textron-owned firm tries out augmented reality in V-280 helo simulator
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  4 days ago

The V-280 Valor simulator has turned heads for several years at defense conferences worldwide for its realism. It’s guided by the helicopter’s actual flight control laws, so flying it in the simulator is the same experience, in a sense, as flying it in real life. The simulator has helped Bell Helicopter show the Army and the public what the helicopter is capable of when it comes to maneuver and speed.

But one of the goals for TRU in developing the V-280 simulator is “to use it as a platform for us to introduce the augmented reality solutions that are out there and we have taken a first cut at it,” John Hayward, TRU’s senior vice president and general manager for the company’s military and business simulation sector, told Defense News at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference on Wednesday.

The technology is “not 100 percent mature and it’s not quite there yet, but it shows you the realm of the possible,” he said.

To bring augmented reality into the cockpit of the simulator, TRU is using an augmented reality/virtual reality headset where users can see their own hands and the actual cockpit controls and avionics. Looking beyond the interior of the helicopter, a virtual scene of a helicopter in flight is superimposed.

The idea is to be able to create a more mobile and easy-setup simulator that breaks free of the need to use an expensive dome and projectors and put the entire virtual reality simulator in a headset environment. And by being able to see your own hands and controls, the learning experience is more real.

While it’s not ready for prime time, Hayward said, “it really gave us the experience to integrate it and learn about it AR and VR, so it’s a good experience for us and it really showcases the current state of technology. The technology is moving so rapidly; by this time next year, I expect it will be amazing.”

And the showroom floor at I/ITSEC is evidence enough that it’s a burgeoning technology. A few other companies brought examples of how to apply the technology to military training, but while closed virtual reality headsets were everywhere, the specific mixed-reality capability didn’t pop up all over the exhibition hall.

Rockwell Collins brought its mixed reality capability ― Coalescence ― to the show again after unveiling it last year. This year it demoed a gunner in the back of a helicopter and a pilot flying a jet. Using an AR/VR headset like TRU, a user can use a real gun and see their own hands, but beyond that a virtual world appears.

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For several industry experts at the show, there is great value in being able to see your own hands and real equipment rather than strange avatar versions.

According to Nicholas Scarnato, Rockwell Collins’ director of marketing and strategy for simulation and training solutions, Coalescence is nearly ready for prime time, as compared to where the capability was last year.

TRU’s Hayward said within the rotorcraft industry and particularly with Bell Helicopter, the firm wants to move toward simulator-based training and focus less on aircraft training. This means that the more realistic training can be in a simulator, the better it is for pilots getting less airtime in a real helicopter.

With this understanding, TRU continues — when thinking about simulators for future aircraft — to look at ways to make the experience as real to the pilots as possible.

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Bell makes progress on V-247 unmanned tiltrotor

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• 23 JANUARY, 2018
  
• SOURCE: FLIGHTGLOBAL.COM
  
• BY: DOMINIC PERRY
  
• LONDON

Bell Helicopter is continuing through the preliminary design review stage of its V-247 Vigilant unmanned tiltrotor, as it waits for its intended US Marine Corps customer to deliver precise requirements for the programme.

Launched in 2016, the V-247 is a self-funded development, which Bell is producing to address an emerging USMC need for a long-range expeditionary aircraft.

Known as MUX, the programme is designed to end a number of "capability gaps" identified by the service, says Keith Flail, the manufacturer's vice-president of advanced tiltrotor systems.

Proposed missions span intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, precision strike, and cargo replenishment, says Flail, with key factors "runway independence" and the ability to fit inside hangars aboard the US Navy's destroyer fleet.

Bell is continuing to liaise with the USMC to ensure its design does not diverge markedly from any eventual requirement.

Flail says preliminary specifications point towards a group 4 or 5 unmanned air vehicle – which have maximum take-off weights of up to, or beyond 560kg (1,320lb), respectively. Endurance is around 6h, with a range of 450nm (834km). However, he points out that this may change as the USMC's requirements solidify.

Any next step would involve a request for information from the service and "we are standing by for that", says Flail.

Bell Helicopter

Bell is also working on the V-280 Valor tiltrotor for the US Army. Although a larger, manned aircraft, Flail believes that effort will provide "enormous risk reduction" for the Vigilant development.

"A lot of the technology we are maturing on the V-280 will carry over well to the V-247," he says, citing production techniques and flight control systems as two key areas.

On previous generation tiltorotors, such as the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, the entire engine assembly tilts as the aircraft transitions from one flight mode to the other.

However, on the V-280, only the prop-rotors move, while the engines remain fixed, in order to improve side access to the aircraft.

Although the unmanned Vigilant is not designed to transport troops, the airframer is "looking at a similar configuration" for the V-247, says Flail.

"There's a recipe for what works and as the V-247 team has been off looking at configurations, that's the configuration we are going for."

Bell has also yet to decide on whether to locate an engine on either wing, or to use a single, centreline powerplant, says Flail.

Bell Helicopter

Meanwhile, Bell is slowly accelerating the rate of test flights on the V-280 as the envelope of the new tiltrotor expands.

The V-280 was first flown on 19 December 2017 and, as of 22 January, it had accumulated 2.7 flight hours, with 38.7h of rotor turning time.

In mid-January, four flights were performed during the same week, with two sorties taking place on the same day.

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The Army has an ambitious plan to develop, build and acquire a

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expected to come online in the 2030s, but naysayers often point to the service’s muddied track record in acquiring new weapons systems,

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.

But this time it will be different, according to Brig. Gen. Frank Tate, the director of Army Aviation in the service’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for operations, planning and training.

“What we want to achieve is significantly different from the way we’ve done business in the past and has the potential to make a huge difference in the future,” Tate told Defense News in a recent interview at the Pentagon.

The pressure is on to succeed.

Future Vertical Lift (FVL) was named the third top priority in a list of

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laid out by the Army when it announced it would stand up

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last fall. And Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley has said the service’s goal in achieving future readiness is for future capability to be 10 times improved.

While that sounds daunting, Tate explained that doesn’t mean an aircraft has to be 10 times faster, can travel 10 times farther, can carry 10 times more in payload and is 10 times more lethal. It’s a “cumulative assessment” of capability based on improvement in those key performance parameters, he said.

So with that in mind, the Army plans to build an FVL aircraft using a method to incrementally achieve more and more capability over time that is not unlike the business strategies employed by Apple and Samsung, Tate said.

“One of the problems with the way we worked in the past is we were working on an industrial era model and you would buy [aircraft] and you would have those [aircraft] for 40 or 50 years and everything is exactly the same and there’s very little change,” Tate said. “Well now we are in a Moore’s Law world and so are our enemies and our adversaries and increasingly Moore’s Law leap-aheads in technology are available at low cost to even low-end adversaries.”

Tate warned that if the Army continues to operate using an industrial-age model where an original equipment manufacturer is locked in to provide both the airframe and everything inside it from the cockpit to the sensors to the weapons systems it will “inherently fall behind a more agile enemy that is not locking themselves into that model.”

While sounding the alarm, Tate acknowledged it’s easier said than done.

Yet, he said, the Army has conceptualized a way to procure its future helicopters along with state of the art technology that will drive FVL capability at a rapid pace.

If it is successful it could mean better procurement results throughout the service.

The Army is separating the work it’s doing to procure an airframe for the helicopter with the work to develop and build missions systems that would go inside.

Two demonstrator aircraft — one from

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and one from a

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team — will spend this year into next flying in order to test out promising technology. And because the Army will spend more time working out the kinks in a prototyping phase rather than during an actual program of record, it will be easier to define requirements and to expedite the process of building and fielding a future aircraft, according to Tate.

Acquiring the right mission systems is a completely different ballgame.

“It will take X number of years to build the [aircraft], but if we were to write a requirements document today that specifies what all the digital Moore’s Law type things are going to be, you are guaranteeing you are going to be buying an antique by the time it comes out,” Tate said. “After a year and a half, I can’t stand my cell phone … because there are already so many better things on the market.”

That same thing applies to sensors and other systems that would go inside a future helicopter, he said.

Aircraft sensors that would provide such capabilities like the ability to see in a degraded visual environment, fly autonomously, or protect the aircraft from enemy fires are expected to evolve at a much more rapid pace than the airframe’s technological capabilities.

“So why would I write a requirements document today that included all those things already? So how do you tackle that though because you need to be able to, when the [airframe] is ready, to then integrate things rapidly that is the most modern, the best thing that can be bought then,” Tate said.

Backbone benefits

The answer is the Army needs to own its own digital backbone that sets up the architecture so any mission system developed to the backbone’s software and hardware standards can plug in akin to how apps are developed for Apple or Samsung, Tate said.

“In a perfect world, that architecture then spreads to all of our platforms over time, potentially not just aviation platforms,” Tate said. “If we are successful in what we want to do in Army aviation that could find its way into tanks or other combat vehicles because now we have a defense backbone, just like Apple has ios.”

And by having a flexible backbone, there are other implications in procurement that could contribute to affordability while also fostering competition.

For example, while there are 2,000 UH-60 Black Hawks in the Army inventory now, not every aircraft will have to have the same sensor, Tate said, because it will be easy to plug-and-play capability.

The Army would order smaller lots of a specific sensor from one company and, perhaps, a few years later a different company will have built something more capable and the Army could then buy that, Tate said.

Currently, the Army is “married” to particular systems within an airframe, Tate said. “We even name funding lines based on the product that won,” a competition, he said. “So I want to change that. I want to name funding lines things like ‘light precision munition,’ no name of what precision munition.”

By increasing competition, technology will advance at a more rapid rate and costs will be driven down in order to stay competitive, according to Tate.

Tate said the first step in establishing a backbone architecture “honestly is the UH-60 Victor.”

Northrop Grumman won a U.S. Army contract to upgrade Black Hawk L-model helicopter cockpits from analogue to integrated, open-architecture digital ones. The converted version is called the Victor-model.

“What they are doing with the Victor program is heading right down that lane of an architecture that the Army will own,” Tate said. “Now, we will have industry partners that are helping us build it and design it and everything like that, but we are not married. If another company comes down the road as Program Executive Office Aviation continues to work on that that has cheaper, better, faster Moore’s Law ideas, it’s a contract of just a few years and then you can recompete and go to another company if you are dissatisfied.”

The Victor will also allow the Army to test how effectively and quickly it can integrate systems onto the aircraft based on vendors designing to a specific standard, he added.

Ideally, the future aircraft’s mission systems will be so flexible, they will be able to be programmed for a mission with the right capabilities in simple reboots overnight, for example, Tate said.

And the level of flexibility of a digital backbone would prevent the catastrophic failures of the past that could kill an entire program.

“You don’t have to kill the whole platform because you are not happy with one of the mission equipment aspects of it, or delay the whole platform because of that. You can cut just that little piece and award it to somebody else that is doing something better all of a sudden,” Tate said.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

keeping the thread alive

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Bell Helicopter's Air Vehicle Concept Demonstrator aircraft, funded under the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstration program, was flown for the first time by an Army pilot Feb. 7.

Chief Warrant Officer 3, Tom Wiggins, of the U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command conducted the flight at the Bell Flight Test Facility in Amarillo, Tex.

During the flight, he performed Hover In Ground Effect repositioning, pattern flight and roll-on landings.

The JMR TD is an Army science & technology effort designed to develop, expand and demonstrate new capabilities in vertical lift technology. The U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center leads the JMR TD effort. It is a precursor to the Department of Defense Future Vertical Lift program.

"One of the keys to this successful S&T demonstration effort is the nature by which the government and industry partners have completely teamed not only during the analysis, design and early qualification efforts, but also for the flight test activity," said JMR TD Program Director Dan Bailey.

FVL will deliver the next generation of vertical lift aircraft to the Joint Warfighter, providing the speed, range, payload, and mission systems critical to successfully engaging the enemy in future operations.

AMRDEC personnel have been fully involved in the demonstrator effort including integration of experimental test pilots and flight test engineers into the mixed flight test team. Army pilots will take part in additional flights throughout the test program.

"With Army combat-experienced, experimental test pilots embedded in Bell's test team, we have a unique opportunity to help bring the project across the finish line and also develop insights valuable to the FVL initiative. We're very proud of CW3 Wiggins," said Director of the Aviation Development Directorate, Dr. Bill Lewis.

Four agreements were awarded under the JMR TD to AVX Aircraft, Bell Helicopter, Karem Aircraft, and a team of Sikorsky-Boeing for initial designs with the Bell and Sikorsky-Boeing efforts funded to build and fly technology demonstrator aircraft.

Bell's first flight with an Army pilot is another on-schedule milestone in an effort that was awarded in September 2013, with Preliminary Design Review in 2014, Critical Design Review and start of aircraft assembly in mid-2015, and assembly complete in early 2017.

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The V-280 tilt-rotor aircraft could change the way air assault troops operate
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  1 day ago

Bell Helicopter’s V-280 Valor tilt-rotor aircraft has a combat range of 500-800 nautical miles, a speed of 280 knots (true airspeed) and capable of a load of more than 12,0000 pounds. (Bell)

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tilt-rotor aircraft should be a welcome addition to units conducting fast rope insertions, rappelling, or any other

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, company officials said.

“This will carry a squad of Army soldiers, or a squad of Marines, to an assault area faster and increase the lethality compared to the

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, which is a larger platform and more of a utility aircraft,” said Jeff Schloesser, a retired Army major general and executive vice president of strategic pursuits for

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Washington operations.

Schloesser spoke to Army Times Thursday during the

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’s annual special operations/low-intensity conflict symposium and exhibition in Arlington, Virginia.

Beyond the increased functionality, it should be more comfortable, too. Troops who have used the Fast Rope Insertion Extraction System, or FRIES, on a V-22 can probably recall the intense rotor wash and engine heat pounding them while trying to grip the rope on insertion.



Because the V-280’s wing doesn’t tilt like a V-22, a necessity for shipboard operations, fast-ropers leaving the aircraft’s side-door avoid “the hot air from the engine going out backwards,” Schloesser said.

“Essentially, what you got is two six-foot doors, you just slide your fast rope bar out, and out you go, and this [wing placement] protects you from that downwash,” he added.

Bell's V-280 Valor on display in Washington, D.C. In addition to its increased range and speed when delivering assault troops, the aircraft will cover more than five times the area of current MEDEVAC helicopters, according to Bell.
The V-280 Valor is a tilt-rotor aircraft built for an Army-led demonstration.

The Army had been planning — through its Joint Multi-Role demonstrator program — for two very different vertical lift prototypes to begin flight demonstrations last fall as part of a critical path to informing and shaping the design of a Future Vertical Lift helicopter fleet expected to hit the skies in the 2030s.

The V-280 had its

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Dec. 18. The other prototype, the Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant coaxial helicopter, is expected to take its first flight some time this year after falling behind on the original goal of September.

Bell’s Valor will come in both an armed and an assault version.

The V-280 isn’t designed for ship launches, but in a pinch, takeoff from the deck of a carrier would be possible.

“It’s shipboard compatible, but it’s not meant to be living on a ship for extended periods of time,” Schloesser said.

“This gets a squad into a combat zone faster, and from a much longer range,” he added. “You could actually use this in the Pacific, and be able to operate off islands.”

Roughly 12 to 14 assault troops would be able to fit in the V-280 during those hypothetical island-hopping scenarios.

“This is an advanced tilt-rotor, so it’s a generation beyond our V-22, that’s currently flying with both AFSOC [Air Force Special Operations Command] and the Marines,” Schloesser said.

Compared to legacy helicopters, like the UH-60 Black Hawk, the new V-280 will fly at twice the speed and twice the range, Schloesser confirmed.

At “500 to 800 nautical miles ... it increases your survivability,” he said. “You don’t have to stop for FARPs [forward air refuelling points], and the speed in which you go over a hostile zone is twice as fast.”

“In other words, the time an enemy has to engage you is cut in half,” he added.

That speed and range isn’t just good for the air assault mission. Bell advertises that its V-280 will have a medical evacuation coverage area five times greater than current helicopters.

In an era where the ‘

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,’ the Defense Department policy that whisks wounded troops off the battlefield to

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, is being stretched thin, that increased coverage could save lives.

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U.S. Army Leadership ‘Won’t Stand’ For Future Vertical Lift Delays


Mar 15, 2018

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| Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

• 
  
  
  
  
  The U.S. Army says developing a next-generation successor to the UH-60 Black Hawk and other legacy helicopters is a high priority that will change how ground forces fight and maneuver in future operating environments: Bell
  
  
  
  The heads of the U.S. Army say they “won’t stand for delays” on the multiservice Future Vertical Lift program, despite a re-phasing in the fiscal 2019 budget.
  
  FVL is the Army’s No. 3 acquisition priority after long-range precision fires and ground vehicle modernization, and therefore it is the Army Aviation community’s No. 1 priority.
  
  FVL-Medium, the first of five planned FVL acquisition programs, would deliver a next-generation replacement for the troop-carrying Army
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  H-60 Black Hawk and
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  Bell H-1 Huey utility/assault helicopters. But there are concerns about how long this first new rotorcraft will take to field, since production and deployment are not scheduled to begin until fiscal 2030.
  
  In fiscal 2018, a request for proposals for the initial technology maturation and risk-reduction phase of FVL-Medium was scheduled for release in fiscal 2019, following Materiel Development and Milestone A acquisition decisions. But the latest plan depicted in the fiscal 2019 budget plan, as released in February, shifts the Milestone A decision and issuance of an RFP into fiscal 2021.
  
  But according to Army officials, that has not decelerated the broader program of record. It actually reverts to the original acquisition timeline.
  
  As noted by service leaders, the Army, although the largest stakeholder in FVL-Medium, is not the acquisition authority. It is a joint program, with oversight from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), like the
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  Lightning II.
  
  “The defense acquisition executive deferred establishing a Milestone A date until after completion of the analysis of alternatives and subsequent requirements development, to ensure the planned acquisition strategy provided an affordable, sustainable and effective materiel solution,” the Army tells Aerospace DAILY in a statement. “The program is still on track for Milestone A decision in fiscal 2021, which was the original proposal for the program.”
  
  Asked to explain the changes to the timeline at a House appropriations committee hearing on Capitol Hill on March 15, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley says the timing of the RFP release will be decided this fall, as planned. He says the long-serving Black Hawk, AH-64 Apache, and
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  Chinook remain “great helicopters” and the Army will continue to spend money to modernize them for the “foreseeable future.” But he stressed that the Army is committed to FVL, which will deliver a faster and more agile platform that can survive and win in future operating environments.
  
  “We need an aircraft that can fly faster and farther than any existing rotary-wing aircraft today,” he says. “We need an aircraft that is agile, both while inflight to avoid enemy air defenses and at the ‘X,’ or landing zone, to evade or survive against intense ground fire.
  
  “Those are some pretty stiff requirements, so the discussion with industry is ongoing right now about what’s out there from a technological standpoint,” Milley said. “We’ll know more throughout the summer, but there is no intent—and the secretary and I are not going to stand for—delays. This is an urgent need.”
  
  At a defense programs forum in Washington on March 6, Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy also denied any deceleration of FVL-Medium, saying “it’s actually on track as a program of record.” He notes that the next milestone decision is expected this fall, sometime between September and December.
  
  Whatever comes out of the milestone decision will influence the phasing of the FVL program for the Army and Marine Corps going forward. It could also impact other Army Aviation programs, such as the Improved Turbine Engine Program. ITEP was conceived as a replacement for the
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  T700 in the Black Hawk and Apache, but could also power a next-generation lightweight Armed Aerial Scout platform.
  
  “The Army continues to explore opportunities to accelerate FVL by engaging OSD and Marine Corps stakeholders to ensure funding is synchronized with requirements,” the Army says in response to questions from Aerospace DAILY. “Once the analysis of alternatives is complete, the defense acquisition executive will establish a Milestone A date.”
  
  Rotorcraft manufacturers such as Bell,
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  , and Sikorsky have been pressing the Army to move faster on FVL, saying their concepts are mature enough to be introduced sooner. Industry teams have spent hundreds of millions of dollars advancing new concepts, with only limited co-investment by the federal government, and they want to see a return on investment.
  
  AVX, Bell, Boeing, Karem, and Sikorsky are the leading participants in the Army’s Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD), an experimentation effort meant to inform the requirements development process for FVL.
  
  Bell has recently been flying its V-280 Valor, a third-generation tiltrotor, in Amarillo, Texas. Meanwhile, Sikorsky and Boeing are completing assembly of the coaxial-rotor SB-1 Defiant in Palm Beach, Florida, with plans to fly by year’s end. Karem and AVX have been maturing their advanced concepts for JMR-TD through laboratory experiments and scaled prototyping.
  
  Army Secretary Mark Esper says the government and industry investment in these technology demonstrators will help the service move faster in the longer term. “We test, we fail, we learn, we prototype, and we repeat until we narrow the requirements and get on a much quicker trajectory to get to the end state we want.”
  
  
  

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Army aviation at ‘a crossroads’ as future requirements take shape


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  22 hours ago

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, according to Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, who has taken the lead on the service’s Future Vertical Lift modernization effort.



But even before the Army makes the decision in the next couple of years on whether it’s ready to take the plunge and back off its older fleet in favor of a new one, the service has submitted initial requirements for its future family of helicopters and those are awaiting approval by Army senior leadership, Rugen said.



“Now we kind of find ourselves at an inflection point of, ‘well, do we keep incrementally upgrading stuff we originally designed in 1970 or do we go for that clean sheet design?’” Rugen said. “Certainly where we are headed is that clean sheet design.”





The approval of those

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will come even before a prototype effort — the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstration (JMR-TD) — wraps up. The effort is supposed to help refine requirements for an FVL program of record.



There are two demonstrators that will fly over the course of the year to educate the Army in terms of what is in the realm of the possible. One aircraft —

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— is already flying while the Sikorsky-Boeing developed aircraft —

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— is delayed by roughly a year and won’t fly until after this summer, but,

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.

Sikorsky and Boeing have worked together on their offering for the U.S. Army's joint multi-role technology demonstrator called the SB-1 Defiant. (Photo courtesy of Boeing and Sikorsky)


With some major requirements encompassing the airframe, its mission systems architecture and even future unmanned aircraft systems close to approval, the Army is making progress

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The Army’s ultimate goal is to initially field a new aircraft in the early 2030s although there

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.



When asked about the apparent delay in the process, Rugen said, “I don’t see it that way,” noting the funding profile remained consistent across the five-year budget plan.



“There were a few very small moves, but that was just housekeeping,” he added. “As far as the Army is concerned we are on the original schedule. We are on schedule.”



Rugen is in charge of a cross-functional team formed specifically to focus on vertical lift modernization, the third most important modernization priority of six the service has laid out.

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, which will be house as part of the Army Futures Command that will stand up this summer.



The CFT has already put a great amount of thought into what a future fleet will look like, how it will operate and how it will contribute to multidomain battle, a guiding concept recently formalized within the service.

Bell Helicopter’s V-280 Valor tilt-rotor aircraft should be a welcome addition to units conducting fast rope insertions, rappelling, or any other air assault operation. (Bell)


The Army plans to build an open systems approach for its FVL aircraft, meaning it will create its own digital backbone that sets up the architecture, so any mission system or sensor developed to the backbone’s software and hardware standards can plug in akin to how apps are developed for Apple or Samsung devices.




[

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]



That system will be demonstrated again in 2020, Rugen noted.



The Army’s CFT is also analyzing what types of unmanned aircraft systems it wants to adopt for the future fleet and while the service is planning demonstrations of prototypes for a future tactical UAS, Rugen said that is just a part of what the service is considering.



For instance, when looking at optimizing for large-scale, multidomain combat, the Army doesn’t see just pairing UAS with manned helicopters like it does now, but in more advanced formations.



[

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]



Modular missile technology is another capability the Army believes it will need in order to improve standoff capability, Rugen said, but noted “quite honestly, the price point needs to improve.”



For example, if the target isn’t an armored vehicle, perhaps there’s something cheaper than Hellfire that can do the job, he said.



Modular missile technology, he explained, gives you a kinetic menu to choose from for the front-end of the missile, from flares to flechettes to armored penetrating shape charge.



“I think it is something that is disruptive,” he added.



The team is also looking at increasing the range of those missiles and how to get after better price points.



The CFT is also interested in using science and technology efforts to help offload the cognitive burden from the air crew, so it is planning to invest in holistic situational awareness capability, according to Rugen. Among that is how to use artificial intelligence in situations of degraded visual environments to navigate safely to the ground. DVE has been a problem the Army has been trying to solve for well over a decade.



The team is working across some of the other CFTs to help deliver certain effects on the battlefield, Rugen said. For example, to improve air-to-ground integration and operating in a GPS or satellite denied environment requires partnering with the Network and the Precision Navigation and Timing CFTs.



And the FVL CFT is working with the Long-Range Precision Fires team on how FVL, in a forward position, could serve as a means to detect and target threats for a Fires team. “We have the means to target for LRPF at

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