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FLRAA Helicopter Decision in ‘Next Few Months,’ Says US Army Chief of Staff

Our Bureau - : Oct 12, 2022 - : 10:11 am

The wait will continue.

The long-awaited decision on the U.S. Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) will take months, according to Gen. James McConville, the chief of staff of the Army. “Within the next few months, we’ll downselect for the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft,” he said on Tuesday, while speaking at AUSA 2022.

When speculations that the decision would come in September turned out to be untrue, many in industry circles believed that the Army would announce its choice before the end of October. Gen. McConville’s comments imply that the service’s choice of the helicopter that wll replace the Army’s decades-old Black Hawk won’t be known until next year.

Rodney Davis, acting deputy program executive officer for aviation, told reporters during a media roundtable on Monday that the Army wasn’t going to provide specific dates. “We are in the quiet period for FLRAA. We’re working through a very event driven but rigorous process to get to that decision. We’re not ready to release that today. We expect that we’ll have a good decision in relatively short order. We’re not talking about exact dates.”

The choice is beteeen Bell Textron’s V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor aircraft, and Boeing-Lockheed Martin’s Defiant X that has coaxial rotors. While the V-280 Valor is a smaller version of the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, Lockheed’s Defiant X is a clean-sheet design, compound helicopter. While the Defiant X has the same footprint as the H-60 and can nest within the Army’s existing infrastructure, adocates of the V-280 Valor contend that it is agile at both low and high speeds, and has the edge when it comes to speed, range, and agility. Defiant X has larger rotors than its competitor.

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