NGRC requirements mainly cover a future medium lift helicopter that costs no more than €35 million ($38.2 million) per aircraft and provisionally planned to enter service between 2035 and 2040.
Different on the outside but with commonalities on the inside, the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) will share a MOSA backbone with the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA).
The service has already asked vendors to come back with digital engineering “artifacts” and designs for two of its six modernization priorities, Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo told reporters.
There are many critical connections being made across the FVL ecosystem that will also serve to modernize the current fleet.
The Army chose the Bell-Textron bird based on a prototype, but an Army official predicted "very little" change for what soldiers will end up flying.
“For the next 40 to 60 years, I see us continuing to incrementally improve [the Black Hawk fleet],” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville told lawmakers on April 19.
Sikorsky now sets sights on winning the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft competition and Black Hawk modernization.
The Army reasoned “Sikorsky’s proposal provided something similar to a drawing of what the house looked like on the outside…. Such a picture did not provide the functional detail that the Army required showing what the space would look like on the inside,” according to the Government Accountability Office.
"In denying the protest, GAO concluded that the Army reasonably evaluated Sikorsky’s proposal as technically unacceptable because Sikorsky failed to provide the level of architectural detail required by the RFP," the office wrote in a statement.
The decision to buy more Black Hawks was particularly interesting as the country is in the midst of a Defense Strategic Review assessing the full panoply of force structure and spending decisions.