This wild new Black Hawk prototype is part drone, part Transformer
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Sikorsky introduced a new unmanned helicopter prototype this week that transforms the design of the Army’s 50-year-old Black Hawk into, well, something more like a Transformer.
Any soldier who has spent time around an Army Black Hawk would find most of the U-Hawk, as Sikorsky is calling it, familiar — its size, shape, rotors and even green paint job are largely unchanged from the Army’s workhorse troop carrier. But the new front end — along with the lack of pilots — may strike former passengers or crew alike as strictly sci-fi.
Sikorsky engineers replaced the cockpit and nose of the UH-60 with clam shell-style opening doors wide and tall enough for an ATV-sized vehicle to be driven onboard via a built-in ramp.
“You could imagine this aircraft conducting collaborative combat aircraft operations as a loyal wing man with a crewed aircraft,” Ramsey Bentley, director of advanced concepts and innovations at Sikorsky, told reporters Monday. “It’s flying in ahead of the soldiers as it comes into the area of operations. It dispenses launched effects. Command of those launched effects are turned over to the soldiers coming in on the next aircraft.”
The U-Hawk has 25% more cargo space than a UH-60L Black Hawk and can carry longer cargo like missiles and uncrewed ground vehicles, according to a company release.
The helicopter’s autonomous flight system runs through a tablet from the ground, using the aircraft’s MATRIX autonomous system, which generates the flight plan and navigation. The company envisions the helicopter to be used for sustainment missions with the extra space or be part of maneuver operations by carrying swarms of drones.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large">
<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">A S-70UAS U-Hawk, with its forward clam shell doors open. Photo courtesy Sikorsky</figcaption></figure>The new aircraft was announced and shown off Monday at the Association of the U.S Army annual conference in Washington D.C.
The aircraft is being developed at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona and is expected to get its first flight next year.
Previous Black Hawks equipped with the autonomous flight system, officials said, have been so simple that soldiers pick it up intuitively.
“We give them the tablet, give them a couple minutes, and then they’re like, leave me alone. I got it,” Bentley said. “We’ve done external load operations, internal load operations. We’ve done personnel recovery operations, all with a soldier at the tablet.”
Sikorsky has modified pre-existing UH-60 Lima versions of Black Hawk helicopters and is open to modifying older aircraft to keep costs down.
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The autonomy software can control the helicopter’s start up, shut down and flight procedures, like engine checks. The operator assigns the helicopter a task like reconnaissance, external or internal load operations.
“You tell the aircraft where you want it to go, then the aircraft executes that mission. The aircraft has sensors and autonomy on board that allows it to see and avoid obstacles. We can integrate threat avoidance with everything else,” Bentley said. “Once you give it the mission task, it even has the capability to pick out emergency landing zones and do all of the emergency procedures just like a human.”
Sikorsky is a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin.
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