Sikorsky Is Formally Protesting Army's Black Hawk Replacement Choice

© Lockheed/Sikorsky Sikorsky Is Formally Protesting Army's Black Hawk Replacement Choice

In a not-so-surprising move, Sikorsky has formally protested the Army’s choice of the Bell V-280 Valor as its Future Long Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA, that will eventually replace the UH-60 Black Hawk.

© Provided by The Drive The SB>1 Defiant is in the running to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk. Lockheed Martin Image

Sikorsky, owned by Lockheed Martin, teamed with Boeing to offer the Defiant X compound coaxial helicopter for FLRAA. It lost out to Bell, whose V-280 advanced tiltrotor was chosen by the Army as its preferred Black Hawk replacement earlier this month. We laid out, in detail, the implications of the Army's decision in this piece.

© Provided by The Drive Sikorsky Is Formally Protesting Army's Black Hawk Replacement Choice

That initial contract award is $232 million. It includes no actual aircraft. Instead, it the contract covers Valor's final digital design that Bell has generated as a result of the aircraft's five-year-long flight testing period and development campaign, inclusive of Army requirements.

The SB>1 Defiant is in the running to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk. Lockheed Martin Image

Filed on Dec. 28, the protest automatically halts work on the FLRAA program while the Government Accountability Office (GAO) weighs Sikorsky’s objections to the Army’s selection. Sikorsky President Paul Lemmo confirmed the filing Thursday afternoon. 

“Based on a thorough review of the information and feedback provided by the Army, Lockheed Martin Sikorsky, on behalf of Team DEFIANT, is challenging the FLRAA decision,” Lemmo said in a prepared statement. “The data and discussions lead us to believe the proposals were not consistently evaluated to deliver the best value in the interest of the Army, our soldiers, and American taxpayers. The critical importance of the FLRAA mission to the Army and our nation requires the most capable, affordable, and lowest-risk solution. We remain confident DEFIANT X is the transformational aircraft the Army requires to accomplish its complex missions today and well into the future.”

© Provided by The Drive Sikorsky Is Formally Protesting Army's Black Hawk Replacement Choice

The Defiant X design was based on dozens of hours of flight tests by the SB>1 Defiant operational prototype, developed in parallel with Valor during the previous Joint Multirole Technology Demonstration, or JMR-TD, program.

SB.1 Defiant and a UH-60 Black Hawk. Sikorsky

Defiant first flew in March 2019, more than a year after Valor first got off the ground in December 2017. The delay was partly due to developmental issues that included problems with its counter-rotating rigid rotor system. Boeing had trouble scaling up the rigid rotors to lift a 30,000-pound aircraft and had to redesign them before Defiant could fly. It was also briefly grounded in 2019, so the Defiant team could tweak the aircraft’s drive train system to avoid “bearing creep” found during the operation of the ground-based propulsion system test bed, or PTSB.

© Sikorsky Sikorsky Raider

A subsequent flight test campaign amassed more than 60 hours of flight time, in addition to ground test and dozens of hours in the PTSB. SB>1 went on to fly at more than 245 knots in level flight, far outpacing conventional helicopters. It achieves those speeds with the help of its coaxial rigid rotors and a pusher propeller.

Aside from that speed milestone, Defiant also:

Achieved greater than 60-degree banked turns.Demonstrated mission-relevant cargo capacity by lifting a 5,300-pound Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System external load.Demonstrated Level 1 low-speed agility with fly-by-wire controls.Integrated U.S. Army test pilots into the Defiant program.

FLRAA was a battle between two very different concepts from the get-go. Both designs achieved the Army’s threshold requirements for a Black Hawk replacement but they did so with two wildly divergent airframes. One was an evolutionary improvement on the V-22 Osprey's tiltrotor concept refined into a design based on the Army's unique requirements. The other was the combination of demonstrated but still somewhat new technologies under Sikorsky's X-2 banner that were melded into an up-scaled configuration.

Bell's V-280 Valor. (Bell)

Sikorsky still has a chance for the X2 concept to gain traction with the U.S. Army as it again goes head-to-head against Bell for the Future Attack Recon Aircraft. FARA, as it is commonly called, is a smaller rotorcraft aimed at filling the role, at least in part, vacated by divestment of the Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior armed aerial scout. In practice, the FARA winner will replace AH-64 Apaches that have filled the gap left by the OH-58D. Sikorsky is pitching the Raider X, based on its S-97 Raider, which has a similar configuration as Defiant. For FARA, Bell is offering a conventional single-main-rotor design called the 360 Invictus.

Sikorsky Raider

Protests of such big-ticket defense contract awards are not usually successful, and Sikorsky thus far has not given much detail about its formal arguments or desired outcome. Still, the impact to the winner and loser of this contract is so big, a fight over it was very

likely. More information should become available later today, and we will update this post as it does.

Contact the author: Dan@thewarzone.com