Army Next-Gen Helicopter: ‘We are not going to yield the air domain’

Photo Credit: U.S. Army photo by Chief Warrant Officer 4 Daniel McClinton

WASHINGTON — Historically, it has taken well over a decade to bring a new aircraft into the Army’s inventory. But the Army can’t wait that long to replace its fleet of rotary-wing aircraft, said Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen. So now, the Army plans to deliver a whole family of new vertical-lift aircraft in less than 10 years.

Rugen, a rotary-wing pilot with more than 2,200 hours of flight time in the MH-60K/L Black Hawk, UH-1 Iroquois, and OH-6 Little Bird, serves as deputy commander for support with the 7th Infantry Division at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. He is also now dual-hatted as the head of the Army’s newly-created Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team.

The team is one of eight designed to expedite the Army’s pursuit of six modernization priorities. Those priorities, first laid out in October by the Army’s Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, are air and missile defense; long-range precision fires; a next-generation combat vehicle; future vertical lift; the Army’s network; and Soldier lethality.

The Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team, or FVL CFT, is focused on replacing legacy Army aircraft such as the CH-47 Chinook, the AH-64 Apache, and the Black Hawk with a new family of aircraft that share a common architecture. New FVL aircraft must “increase our reach, our lethality, our sustainability, protection, or survivability, and maintainability,” Rugen said.

“This is going to be something that we are open to rotorcraft, not necessary helicopters,” Rugen explained. “It’ll be vertical-lift rotorcraft, but maybe some things that are different, more compound, advanced designs.”

FVL will also be “clean-sheet” designed, Rugen said — that is, completely new.

“We don’t want to take a form factor like Apache or Blackhawk or Chinook and apply something to it,” he said. Instead, the Army hopes to “make the next generation of those vehicles.”