It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! No, It’s Aircraft That Fly Like A Bird!

It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! No, It’s Aircraft That Fly Like A Bird!
It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! No, It’s Aircraft That Fly Like A Bird!

In the 1934 film “It Happened One Night,” fictional slime ball “King” Westley shows off by floating to a landing on the lawn of his fiancée’s daddy’s estate in a newfangled autogiro – an airplane with a rotor to enable short take offs and landings. Today, two Defense Department programs are striving to meet the…

Future Vertical Lift Begins Open Software Quest

Future Vertical Lift Begins Open Software Quest
Future Vertical Lift Begins Open Software Quest

WASHINGTON: The first Future Vertical Lift Aircraft won’t fly until the 2030s but the Army, Navy, and industry are already at work on software standards. Those include a new “model-based” approach to software architectures that will require a culture change among programmers and defense bureaucrats alike. Why take on so much so early? Because FVL will…

Sikorsky Unveils S-97 Raider: Road To FVL?

Sikorsky Unveils S-97 Raider: Road To FVL?
Sikorsky Unveils S-97 Raider: Road To FVL?

The company that built the first workable helicopter rolled out a (potential) revolution in chopper technology yesterday: Sikorsky’s high-speed S-97 Raider. A year ago, Sikorsky made a splash at the huge Association of the US Army conference with just a life-size mock-up. Now, just in time to talk it up at AUSA 2014, they’ve built a working…

Future Vertical Lift: One Program Or Many?

Future Vertical Lift: One Program Or Many?
Future Vertical Lift: One Program Or Many?

WASHINGTON: What is Future Vertical Lift? There is no one answer, but rather a range of possibilities. At one extreme is a single mega-program, building four variants for the four services to replace a host of existing helicopters, a vision in some ways even more ambitious than the long-troubled tri-service Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). At the…