New and Improved U.S Army Chopper: Ready for Combat

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For years, the U.S. Army’s vision for Future Vertical Lift helicopters and aircraft fleet was to
engineer platforms that would be able to operate in dangerous high threat environments in the
The 2030s and to not currently focus on the development of new aircraft technologies. As part of this
endeavor, the vision of the U.S. Army for its future rotorcraft is to improve sustainability, meaning
aircrafts will need to be both maintained and upgraded for future decades.

According to The National Interest, BELL engineers of the V-280 Valor (a tiltrotor aircraft that was
recently submitted as an offering as part of the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft
competition) have attempted to anticipate and align with the U.S. Army’s vision for long-term
reliability and sustainability. Their strategy seeks to use MOSA (Modular Open Systems Architecture)
to guarantee long-term upgradeability and sustainability through the use of common technical
standards, internet protocols, and specific interfaces intended to improve interoperability.

The MOSA aircraft has been designed to operate into the 2030s and beyond, via paradigm-changing
speed, agility, weapons, computing, sensors, and range. All of these components of next-generation
technologies must achieve breakthrough performance parameters, such as the ability to fly faster
and farther than a Black Hawk helicopter without refueling but also to be sustained and upgraded
decades into the future.

MOSA is specifically intended to keep pace with emerging concerns such as cyber war, enemies with
superior precision, range, and more advanced jamming capabilities while focusing on sustainability
enhancements to enable long-term safety for the aircraft itself and its crew.

“MOSA gets after those things that were most frequently changing and being able to upgrade at
what I call the speed of relevance. If the enemy figures out a new way to push something at you to
take the aircraft down, you need to rapidly be able to counter that with survivability gear,” said Maj.
Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser (ret.), the executive vice president at Strategic Pursuits at BELL’s Advanced
Vertical Lift Center.

“We eliminated problems at the source and redesigned components to increase core reliability and
ease of manufacturing. More ‘time-on-wing’ yields decreased maintenance actions” Schloesser said.