Bell presses on with FLRAA as Army cools on large programs

Just months after the Army canceled one planned helicopter, and just a day after its top officer hinted at other large-program cuts, Bell Textron execs said they’re simply focusing on starting deliveries of their V-280 tiltrotor by decade’s end.

“There are things we can't control. The things we can control: execution, schedule, staying within the cost objectives of the Army,” said Frank Lazzara, who leads the company’s sales and strategy efforts for the service’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA, program.

At the Army’s mainstay conference, Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said the service won’t hesitate to cut programs that don’t support its modernization goals—and will no longer buy programs “for ten years at a time.” The service has canceled programs it invested billions in, like the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program, or FARA—an effort once hailed as the service’s No. 1 aviation priority. And FARA’s end might not be the final dramatic program move the Army makes, service officials have warned.

"Even if it was a requirement in the past. Even if it was a program of record, we may have to stop buying it," George said on Tuesday at the AUSA conference. 

Asked about George’s speech, Lazarra said that in the government, someone’s always coming after someone else’s money, and the Army has a lot of programs it needs to pay for. 

“But if we stay on track with what their objectives are, those are the things we can control, and I think those are the things that keep a program viable and safe and protect the budget for the program,” he said. 

The FLRAA program, which will partially replace the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, could be worth up to $70 billion for Bell—depending on how many aircraft the company sells to the Army and foreign militaries.  

The total FLRAA buy hinges on budgetary constraints, and what the Army learns once it gets the aircraft to its test unit, said Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commanding general of the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence and Fort Novosel.

But Gill emphasized that the Army is “all in” on FLRAA, and called it one of the service’s major modernization programs.

“I'm not worried, but if it doesn't perform, then it becomes a risky program, and then potentially does get cut. I think, between us setting requirements, the research and development, the science and technology, all those things coming together, and then the manufacturer delivering on that—if it's on schedule, if it performs the way that I feel like [it will], then it's a safe program. I mean, we need the capability. It is a next-generation transformational capability. If those things don't happen, then I don't disagree with the chief. Then you have to look at it and say, ‘Is this what the Army needs to pay for? And I think the chief and secretary do that with every single program’,” Gill told reporters Wednesday. 

Part of the Army’s plan to keep costs low on FLRAA is to build the aircraft with a modular, open-systems architecture, so upgrades are easy and cheaper, and the service isn’t locked into one subcontractor’s component for the aircraft’s entire lifespan. 

“What the Army wants is to be able to control their own destiny. So the open systems approach will create more competition. It'll probably help with some level of cost control. They're not beholden to a sub[contractor] or a contract or anything,” Lazarra said. And this new approach to acquisition will be a “litmus test” for industry to see if they can adapt and do business another way, he said. 

Fuselage twist

Company execs at AUSA also confirmed a major switch-up to FLRAA production plans: Bell will now build the tiltrotor’s fuselage in-house, pulling the work away from Spirit AeroSystems in the wake of Boeing’s proposal to reacquire the company. The move was first reported in July by Aviation Week. 

“We want to control the quality and the timeline and the schedule and the things we can control, and we don't want anything else to put that in jeopardy,” Lazzara said. 

The company is “fully prepared” to start building the fuselages in-house, he said, and has been building the team for a while since this is “something we’ve seen coming.” 

Lazzara said he doesn’t anticipate the move affecting the program’s schedule.  

“Any time we can take in the work for a part of the aircraft, and we can control just quality, timeline, cost, all those other things, we're excited to do it and anytime we can bring more work into Bell that helps across the board with other things that have cost involved,” he said. 

Army’s already practicing

As the Army awaits the arrival of its high-speed, high-capacity tiltrotors in 2030, it is already practicing the new operating concept that they will enable. The idea behind “large-scale, long-range air assault,” or L2A2, is to “deliver one brigade combat team in one period of darkness, over 500 miles, arriving behind enemy lines, and able to conduct sustained combat operations,” said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, who leads the 101st Airborne Division. And the service can’t do this with the platforms it has today, he said.

Sylvia’s team has started working on the new tactics, techniques, and procedures and has practiced the concept four times in live demos over the last year, and multiple times in simulation. In the simulation, replacing UH-60s with FLRAA gave the combat aviation brigade “four times the amount of heavy-lift aircraft than what I have today,” Sylvia said.

In the most recent test, the unit used its existing helicopters to move a brigade combat team about 570 miles, from Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border to Fort Johnson in Louisiana. The movement required three nights, two mission support sites, and six forward arming-and-refueling points. But in a simulation that used FLRAAs, the same mission required half the sustainment and security footprint--and just one night, Sylvia said.

“We are building, over the course of the next few years, this air assault combat aviation brigade. We are doing the things in order to be able to build the foundation so that all we have to do is just receive the aircraft and we'll be ready to execute,” he said.