The Army is Building its Future Aircraft to Fly into the 2060s

Video Above: Hypersonic Weapons | Army Research Lab

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

Years ago, the Army vision for its fleet of Future Vertical Lift helicopters and aircraft was intended to engineer platforms with a specific mind of operating in a dangerous, future threat environment in the 2030s and not merely focus on the near term when it comes to the development of paradigm-changing new aircraft.

As part of this, the Army vision for its future rotorcraft is grounded in extended sustainability, meaning the aircraft will need to be both maintained and upgraded for decades moving into the future.

Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft Competition | V-280 Valor

Bell engineers of the V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor aircraft now submitted as an offering in the Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft competition, sought to anticipate and align with the Army vision for long-term reliability and sustainability of its platform. Bell’s strategy seeks to align with the Army vision through its use of Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA), an approach intended to ensure long-term upgradeability and sustainability through the use of common technical standards and IP protocol and specific interfaces intended to improve interoperability.

MOSA is an extremely critical key because the aircraft has for years been specifically designed for future decades into the 2030s and well beyond, in part by introducing paradigm-changing speed, range, agility, weapons, sensors and computing. All of these components of next-generation technologies need to not only achieve breakthrough performance parameters, such as 300-mph speeds more than twice the speed of a Black Hawk and an ability to fly twice as far without refueling, but also be sustained and upgraded for decades into the future.

More specifically, survivability and sustainability enhancements will be critical in coming years as adversaries acquire more range, precision, jamming capability and cyber war technologies in coming years. MOSA is specifically intended to keep pace with these emerging concerns, if not stay entirely in front of them to enable long-term safety for the aircraft and its crew.