Bell’s V-280 Valor Tiltrotor Picked As Army’s Black Hawk ReplacementBell’s V-280 tiltrotor bests Sikorsky and Boeing’s Defiant X coaxial helicopter to replace the Army’s aging fleet of iconic UH-60 Black Hawks.
BY DAN PARSONS
PUBLISHED DEC 5, 2022 7:26 PM
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/bells-v-280-valor-tiltrotor-picked-as-armys-black-hawk-replacementAfter a thoroughly strenuous and lengthy period of flight tests spread over several years, the Army has chosen Bell’s V-280 Valor advanced tiltrotor to replace the venerable UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
Dubbed the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA, Valor is set to enter service in the mid-2030s and eventually will supplant the Sikorsky-built helicopter that has served as the Army’s workhorse utility rotorcraft for more than four decades.
The initial contract award is $232 million and includes no actual aircraft – the initial contract covers Valor's final digital design that Bell has generated as a result of the aircraft's five-year-long flight testing period and development campaign, inclusive of Army requirements. The total award, with options for physical aircraft, runs to $1.2 billion and then to $7 billion to begin building out the fleet, according to Maj. Gen. Robert Barrie, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation.
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The award is a huge win for Bell. The company recently completed planned deliveries of the latest versions of the venerable H-1 family of rotorcraft to the Marine Corps, built the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior that the Army retired years ago, and, with Boeing, developed variants of the V-22 Osprey for the Marines, Air Force, and Navy. However, it currently has no other major production contracts on the horizon with the U.S. military. The company has invested millions into manufacturing and digital design capabilities in various facilities in and around Fort Worth and Amarillo, Texas.
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Valor posted hundreds of flight hours in its flight test campaign and notched more than the 280 knots speed it was named for and designed to achieve. Conventional helicopters cannot get anywhere near that speed. In fact, the V-280, which is a demonstrator and not a finalized design for the Army, broke the 300-knot barrier in testing.
Valor’s first flight occurred on Dec. 18, 2017, and has since logged more than 200 hours in the air and met a number of ambitious speed and agility goals set by the Army under the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstration (JMR-TD) program.
Bell flew Valor for three and a half years before grounding the operational prototype in 2021. Sikorsky and Boeing continued to fly Defiant, which was still performing data-gathering sorties as recently as October but lagged behind the V-280 in flight hours because of developmental growing pains associated with its rigid composite main rotor blades and transmission system. The SB>1 first flew in 2019.
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