The U.S. Army has revealed new details about what it wants from its high-speed, long-range replacement for the UH-60 Black Hawk series of helicopters. The service’s goal is to have the first examples of this future assault rotorcraft in service by 2030, with additional variants for U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.S. Marine Corps following soon thereafter.
The Army’s Program Executive Office for Aviation issued a request for information regarding what the service formally calls the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) on Apr. 4, 2019. FLRAA is part of the over-arching Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program, through which the service hopes to replace all of its existing helicopters.
If the Army keeps to its proposed schedule, it will award a contract for the rotorcraft – which could be an advanced compound helicopter or a tilt-rotor design – in late 2021. The plan is then to have the selected aircraft make its first flight in 2024 and have the first fully-equipped unit operational with the type six years after that. There is no estimated total purchase order at present, but the service does have more than 2,000 UH-60s of all types across active duty units, the Army Reserve, and the Army National Guard.
The Army wants the FLRAA to have a top speed of 250 knots, or more than 285 miles per hour, and potentially up to 280 knots, or more than 320 miles per hour. The maximum speed of the Army’s latest iteration of the Black Hawk, the UH-60M, is still under 200 miles per hour.
The FLRAA should also have an unrefueled combat radius of 200 nautical miles and possibly over 300 nautical miles. The threshold requirement for rotorcraft’s maximum range, which it could use to self-deploy to forward locations, would be at least 1,725 nautical miles, while the objective goal is 2,440 nautical miles.
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