Bell Textron will build the U.S. Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) fuselages in Wichita, Kansas, the company announced this week.
The company won the Army’s bid to build FLRAA in late 2022 after a competition in which it and a Sikorsky-Boeing team flew technology demonstrators for several years to evaluate aircraft capabilities and eliminate risks to a future record-setting program.
Bell will use an existing facility near Textron Aviation Defense and plans to begin work there “in the coming months,” according to a statement.
The company will also perform support work at several of its advanced manufacturing facilities in Texas, such as the Advanced Composite Center in Fort Worth. Final assembly will take place in Amarillo.
The Army’s FLRAA program moved out of technology development and into the critical engineering and production development phase in August.
The FLRAA program is estimated to be worth approximately $70 billion over its lifetime, including foreign military sales, and will replace approximately 2,000 Black Hawk utility helicopters.
The future advanced tiltrotor will not serve as a one-for-one replacement for existing aircraft, but is expected to take over the role of the Black Hawk, long the Army’s workhorse, around 2030.
The initial implementation of the FLRAA program has already been delayed by a year due to protests from Sikorsky’s parent company, Lockheed Martin, over the agency’s selection of Textron Bell’s advanced tiltrotor design. The Sikorsky and Boeing design consisted of coaxial rotor blades.
The Government Accountability Office dismissed Lockheed’s protest in April 2023.
The Army will now equip the first unit with this capability in fiscal year 2031. Limited user testing is expected sometime in FY27 to FY28.
The contract award in 2022 includes nine options. Entering the engineering and production development phase means the Army will exercise the first option, with Bell providing a detailed aircraft design and building six prototypes.
The first aircraft in this phase is expected to fly in 2026, while initial low-speed production will begin in 2028.
“As Bell prepares for the next phase of FLRAA’s development phase, we are committed to investing in advanced manufacturing to ensure we deliver exceptional performance at an affordable price for our customer,” said Lisa Atherton, Bell’s president and CEO, in the statement.
“Textron has a rich history with both the state of Kansas and the city of Wichita,” she said, “and we are proud to deepen that relationship as we establish this new facility.”
