Future vertical lift could be shot in the arm for industry.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin

* The Army's forthcoming future vertical lift program--which would replace thousands of aging helicopters--will rejuvenate the United States' stagnant military helicopter market, experts and executives said.

The service wants a new vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that will have light, medium, heavy and ultra-sized variants with commonality in components such as drive train and avionics. The medium aircraft will also be split into two versions--a utility and attack aircraft.

The FVL program--which is being led by the Army and could replace aircraft across all four services--is being preceded by what is known as the joint multi-role technology demonstrator. Last year, the Army downselected from four vendors to two--a Boeing-Sikorsky team offering the SB-1 Defiant and Bell Helicopter offering the V-280 Valor.

The JMR demonstrator will be required to fly at least 230 knots and is to be designed as the medium-variant of the FVL aircraft. Flight tests are slated for 2017.

Dan Bailey, the program manager for JMR, said the demonstrator is a way for industry to get its feet wet after years of producing the same traditional helicopters.

"We have not in the vertical lift arena put a newly designed aircraft on the street in four decades," he said. "From an industry perspective and the government side as well, the competencies and the tools that are required to design a new aircraft had atrophied significantly."

"Not only have we bolstered that back up for executing a future vertical lift family of systems program in the future, we've done it in a way that I think is really unprecedented," he said. "Taking aircraft from a paper design to a flight test in three years is a big deal."

Because the JMR program is meant to only produce a demonstrator, there will be no contract award at the end. However, the technology will greatly influence the design and requirements of future rotorcraft, said Rich Kretzschmar, acting project manager for the Army's FVL program.

"When we develop the requirements for FVL, the fact that Dan's program has flown those technologies certainly reduces the risk of us getting from what is now state of the art to what we want to buy," he said. "We can more deliberately, more accurately say, We want it to go this fast. We want it to carry this much. We want it to have this much endurance,' and know with much more certainty that those requirements can be met with reasonable risk, schedule and cost."

Raymond Jaworowski, a senior...