Mark Huber is an aviation industry veteran who has worked in the flight training, aircraft sales, aircraft component, and airport development businesses. He has flight time in more than 50 different and diverse aircraft, including helicopters, aerobatic aircraft, vintage warbirds, jet fighters, business jets and turboprops, and transport-category aircraft. He has jumped out of several of these—on purpose—with a parachute. His defense and aviation journalism has been published in a variety of national and international periodicals.

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Mark Huber

Sikorsky announced recent updates to its compound, coaxial helicopter entrants in the competition for the U.S. Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) and Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) programs.&nbsp;

 


The Raider X competitive prototype (CP) for FARA is now 85 percent complete and is weight on wheels and has begun powering on at the Sikorsky Development Flight Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. The aircraft has accomplished nearly 50 percent of the required system acceptance test procedures. Meanwhile, the build of a second Raider X fuselage is complete and it is integrated into Sikorsky’s structural test program to validate the flight and ground loads capability of the airframe.&nbsp;“The second fuselage has not only increased the efficiency of the build and test of our first CP aircraft, it gives us the option to build it out as a second CP aircraft,” said Sikorsky FARA Chief Engineer Pete Germanowski.

 


The Raider X features modular open system architecture (MOSA)-based avionics and mission systems offering plug-and-play options for computing, sensors, survivability, and weapons. Sikorsky is utilizing a variety of risk reduction tools to develop the aircraft including the leveraging of parent Lockheed Martin’s $600 million investment in digital thread and advanced manufacturing and flight data previously gleaned from the S-97 Raider, an 80 percent scale prototype of the Raider X design.&nbsp;

 


In March, Sikorsky flew its initial prototype for the FLRAA competition, the SB-1 Defiant, from West Palm Beach to Nashville for the annual Army Aviation Association of America convention. The SB-1, which spent three years in flight test, is the progenitor aircraft for Sikorsky’s refined Defiant X competitive prototype for the FLRAA competition with Bell’s V-280 tiltrotor.

 


The company also revealed more supplier partners on the program including ATI Forged Products, Collins Aerospace, Parker Aerospace, Magnaghi Aeronautica, and Marotta Controls.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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