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Bell has offered to replace the U.S. Navy’s MH-60 fleet with uncrewed V-247 Vigilant aircraft.
From the SH-60B to the MH-60S, the 40-year career of the Sikorsky Seahawk service has helped define the U.S. Navy’s sea-based capabilities for antisubmarine and antisurface warfare. The pair of hangars on each Arleigh Burke-class Flight IIA and Flight III destroyer are designed specifically to house the venerable twin-engine helicopter.
The guided-missile destroyers will remain in the fleet for decades to come, but not the Seahawks. The first MH-60S helicopters delivered to the Navy are now more than 20 years old. The antisubmarine and countermine MH-60R is only slightly younger. As both models are scheduled to begin phasing out by the end of the next decade, the Navy is contemplating how a new generation of rotorcraft technology can meet the surface fleet’s needs while somehow fitting inside the Arleigh Burke-class hangars.
- The service plans an industry day event before October
- Downselect is scheduled by the end of fiscal 2027
The Navy completed a procedural milestone called Gate 2 for the Future Vertical Lift-Maritime Strike (FVL-MS) program in February, Col. Eric Ropella, leader of the Expeditionary and Maritime Aviation-Advanced Development Team, said May 2 at the Modern Day Marine expo.
“It basically makes it more real and says, ‘Yes, this is something that we want to mature.’ And now we’re in a phase where we are going to develop the requirements,” he said.
The approval allows the Navy to start creating a capability development document, which establishes the performance requirements. Navy staffers will work on setting initial performance parameters with a range of threshold and objective values. A concept of operations for the FVL-MS system also will be proposed. Completing those steps will advance the program to Gate 3 in the Navy’s process. At that point, the life cycle sustainment strategy and export or co-development potential of the program will be determined.
“The Navy does plan to put up some sort of press statement that says where the program is, but more importantly, in the hopefully last quarter of this fiscal year is when the Navy wants to have an industry day where they can explain to industry what is next for Future Vertical Lift-Maritime Strike,” Ropella said.
In parallel, the Navy plans to reduce development risk through two demonstrations. The first was scheduled to begin in the first quarter and focuses on the integration of a modular open-systems approach to the aircraft’s systems. The other is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of fiscal 2025 and focuses on sensor technology.
If the current schedule proceeds as planned, the Navy will be ready to release a request for proposals by the end of fiscal 2026, then award a contract by the end of the next fiscal year for a single company to perform a two-year technology maturation and risk reduction. A multiyear engineering and manufacturing development phase would begin afterward.
A mystery still hangs over the Navy’s options. A marinized version of the U.S. Army’s chosen successor for the land-based Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk is not possible. The Bell V-280 Valor—even when modified with folding blades and stowed rotors—will not fit inside the hangars of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The Navy has not discussed desired performance in several years. In 2019, a senior Navy official said the service did not share the Army’s preference for 300-kt. speed but instead valued greater endurance.
In addition to meeting the Navy’s endurance requirements, the FVL-MS aircraft must have the flexibility to perform the missions of both the MH-60S and MH-60R, although possibly with a similar two-variant approach.
For its part, Bell has proposed the V-247 Vigilant, an autonomous tiltrotor. In 2022, Bell resized the V-247 for the Navy’s FVL-MS requirement, reducing the original 35,000-lb. system for a Marine Corps mission to a 28,000-lb. design.
The system would have to overcome the issues that led to the early retirement of the Northrop Grumman MQ-8C Fire Scout, an autonomous variant of the Bell 407 helicopter. The Navy acquired 38 MQ-8Cs to augment the MH-60R’s countermine mission. The fleet achieved initial operational capability in 2019, but the Navy plans to park all of the aircraft in storage by the end of the year.
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