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U.S. Army officials want to scrutinize Bell’s final design for the FLRAA in the coming months.
Considering the challenging distances between small islands in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Army decided nearly two years ago to buy a 300-kt., self-deployable tiltrotor aircraft to support the future air assault mission.
As the components of the prototype aircraft enter production, program officials for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) are coming to grips with its operational and training implications.
- FLRAA critical design review is set for the summer of 2025
- A virtual prototype will inform changes in air assault tactics
“It’s vitally important that we start learning how to fly tilt-rotors—not just the tactics of it, but how to do it,” Col. Jeffrey Poquette, FLRAA program manager, said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting Oct. 16. “It’s primarily an airplane, [but] we are helicopter pilots. It’s only a helicopter for takeoff and landing. That’s the whole point.”
Tiltrotor missions require different training and planning for air crews.
“Two hundred and eighty to 300-kt. thinking is a lot different than 90-100-kt. thinking,” said Carl Coffman, Bell’s vice president of military sales and strategy.
But the Army is not starting from scratch. FLRAA program officials are in contact with Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey experts in the Air Force Special Operations Command and Marine Corps, which have operated tiltrotors in combat for nearly two decades. An experimental test pilot who is qualified in the V-22 recently joined the FLRAA program office, Poquette said.
The FLRAA program office will receive another unique tool soon.
The Army decided in 2019 to speed up the FLRAA program, shortening the first-unit-equipped milestone by three years to 2031. In the process, the service converted the program from the traditional acquisition process to the Middle Tier of Acquisition authority, which helps accelerate programs by eliminating several administrative steps. To qualify, however, the program must produce a deliverable within five years. Knowing it would be impossible to produce a physical prototype by 2024, the FLRAA program settled on receiving a virtual prototype from Bell.
The high-level simulation of the Army’s first tiltrotor can assist in the tactical leap from helicopters to tiltrotors, even before Bell finalizes the FLRAA design next summer. The Army will install Bell’s virtual prototype in simulators at two Alabama bases: the training center at Fort Novosel and near the program office at Redstone Arsenal.
“Normally, simulators lag the aircraft,” Poquette said. “You build the aircraft, and then you go try to build a simulator for training purposes. In this case, the simulator . . . comes ahead of it.”
The pending delivery of the virtual prototype marks the start of an intense, final phase in the FLRAA design process. The Army expects to complete the critical design review in less than 10 months. Then, Bell will spend the next year and a half assembling the first of the physical FLRAA prototypes. To keep the program’s 2031 fielding date on schedule, the Army needs to complete limited user tests with the prototype fleet in 2027. Any requested design tweaks after the user tests will be incorporated in the first batch of production aircraft to be delivered two years later.
Despite the pressure to keep on schedule, Army officials say they are willing to fall slightly behind if it means making better decisions that avoid problems.
“We refer to this as ‘go slow to go fast,’” Poquette said. “One of the things I try to impress upon people is budgets are tight, and FLRAA is expensive. It’s the largest program in Army history. . . . We can’t build four or eight prototypes that miss the mark on the thing that’s important to the Army.”
The service also added a new requirement to the FLRAA design process. The tiltrotor is among the first Army programs to adopt a requirement for suppliers to comply with a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to the avionics and mission systems. The goal of the MOSA policy is to simplify and reduce the cost of changes and upgrades. The approach requires Bell to prove up front that it will be able to swap out subsystems seamlessly, including with some government-required hardware that predates the Army’s MOSA standard.
“We’ve got 286 MOSA use cases we have to prove out to the Army,” Coffman said. “That’s a priority for them.”
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