When the US Army terminated its Future Attack and Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) effort in early 2024, beyond cancelling an individual programme, the decision might also have indicated that the sun may have set on the armed reconnaissance helicopter as a viable type for the 21st century battlefield.
On 8 February 2024 the US Army announced that it would discontinue development of the Future Attack and Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) as part of a “transformational rebalancing” of its future aviation initiatives.
In ending the FARA effort the Army said that its leaders had “assessed that the increased capabilities it offered could be more affordably and effectively achieved by relying on a mix of enduring, unmanned, and space-based assets”. The army added that, “without reprioritising funds in its constrained aviation portfolio, the army faced the unacceptable risk of decline and closure of production and sustainment lines for the Chinook and Black Hawk fleets”.
In terminating the FARA programme, however, the US Army may not have only ended a single programme, but could possibly have ended once and for all the relevance of armed aerial reconnaissance helicopters in the FARA mould, at the very least in the US Army inventory.
That is not to say that other armed forces do not operate armed rotary-wing platforms beyond out-and-out attack helicopters, which they do, of course, but these aircraft tend to be multi-role aircraft used for a variety of missions, such as supporting special forces operations, rather than the overt battlefield armed reconnaissance role that was envisaged under the FARA programme.
Moreover, there must be few if any other armed forces, at least in the Western-oriented world, that would have the defence budget of the US Army to pursue such a niche battlefield manned rotary-wing capability.
The RAH-66 Comanche
FARA, of course, is not the only armed reconnaissance helicopter programme that the US Army has initiated and then terminated; in fact, over the last 40 or so years, it is the fourth. Back in the early 1980s, well before unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) had made any significant mark on the battlescape, developing a fast, stealthy, armed reconnaissance helicopter certainly sounded like a good idea and thus the RAH-66 Comanche programme was born.
Formally initiated in 1983, what was then the Light Helicopter Experimental (LHX) programme was intended to replace a number of ageing US Army rotary-wing platforms – including Bell UH-1 ‘Huey’ gunships, Bell AH-1 Cobra light attack helicopters, Hughes OH-6 Cayuse light observation and attack helicopters and Bell OH-58 Kiowa light helicopters – with a single type. Crucially, the new helicopter was intended to be stealthy and manoeuvrable to increase its survivability over the battlefield.
Because the production run of the LHX aircraft was originally intended to run to around 6,000 aircraft – too much for any single one of the four major US helicopter producers (Bell, Boeing, McDonnell and Sikorsky) to handle – the US Army directed the companies to team up. Boeing and Sikorsky were the first to announce their teaming as the First Team, while Bell and McDonnell subsequently announced they had formed the SuperTeam.
The production level of 6,000 aircraft, combined with the fact that the US Army had opted for a conventional helicopter design rather than pursuing emerging, more exotic rotary-wing technologies, should have produced an acceptable unit cost, although the requirement for stealth will have added its own premium.
Both LHX teams were awarded contracts for the initial phases of a demonstration/validation programme in October 1988 and in February 1991 submitted their best and final offers for the next phase of the programme, which called for building and flight testing LHX prototypes in 1994.
On 9 April 1991 the US Army announced the Boeing/Sikorsky First Team as the winning bidder, with a full-scale development contract intended to deliver the first production LHX in 1998. The Boeing/Sikorsky design featured aero structural measures to reduce the aircraft’s radar cross section (RCS), measures to reduce its acoustic signature and the ability to internally carry Hellfire and Stinger missiles while also being armed with a retractable 20 mm automatic cannon.
By this time, however, the LHX production run had already come down to 1,300 aircraft, while reductions in yearly funding and the loading on of additional requirements caused the programme schedule to constantly slip to the right.
Nevertheless, the first Boeing/Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche prototype was rolled out on 25 May 1995 and made its maiden flight on 4 January 1996, after which a generally successful flight test programme was carried out. At the time there was much enthusiasm for the Comanche; a number of hobbyist construction kit manufacturers offered models of the aircraft, while computer games manufacturers also developed combat flight simulators starring the RAH-66.
Such enthusiasm for the programme from outside the US Department of Defense (DoD), however, obviously had no bearing with regard to keeping the programme on the rails, while support from the US Army, US DoD and US Congress continued to vacillate over the course of the programme. Reductions in funding, numerous restructurings of the programme that added costs and led to a further 126 aircraft being cut and additions of extra requirements, which put extra weight into the aircraft and required a more powerful engine and larger rotor diameter, all took their toll. While an engineering, manufacturing and development (EMD) contract was signed on 1 June 2000, by April 2002 the US DoD was already talking about cutting major defence programmes to finance new transformational technologies and ultimately, on 23 February 2004, the DoD terminated the Comanche programme.
The two Comanche prototypes that were produced now reside at the US Army Aviation Museum at Fort Rucker in Alabama. With the overall LHX/RAH-66 programme having topped USD 7 billion by the time the programme was terminated, they are almost certainly the most expensive helicopters ever built.
The ARH-70 Arapaho
In 2004, in the wake of the Comanche cancellation, the US Army decided to initiate a more modest procurement in the form of the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (ARH) programme, a request for proposals for which was issued on 9 December 2004. The idea was to take a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) design as the basis for a replacement of the army’s fleet of ageing Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior armed observation and reconnaissance helicopters, with the initial goal of producing 30 operational helicopters and eight trainers by September 2008. Boeing responded by bidding an upgraded version of the MH-6 Little Bird in the form of the MH-6M Mission Enhanced Little Bird (MELB), while Bell offered a militarised and upgraded version of its Bell 407 helicopter. Bell was duly announced as the winning bidder on 29 July 2005 and was issued a contract to provide 368 helicopters. Bell’s ARH demonstrator first flew on 3 June 2005, while, after some delays in configuring prototypes as preproduction aircraft to meet the short time-scale required, a first ARH-70 made its maiden flight on 20 July 2006.
However, on 21 February 2007 a fourth ARH-70 prototype made a forced landing due to a fuel starvation issue and on 22 March 2007 the army issued a ‘Stop Work’ notice to Bell, giving the company 30 days to present a plan to put the ARH programme back on schedule. As programme costs grew and Bell parent company Textron warned that the programme was unviable under the contract, production funding for the ARH-70 was zeroed out by the defence panel of the US House Appropriations Committee in the US DoD’s 2008 defence budget. After the US Army filed a Nunn-McCurdy breach with regard to the ARH programme on 9 July 2008, citing a 40% cost escalation and schedule delays, the US Army terminated the ARH programme on 16 October 2008.
The Armed Aerial Scout programme
After the ARH programme was cancelled, in November 2012 the US Army decided to stand up an Armed Aerial Scout (AAS) programme to replace its OH-58F Kiowa Warrior helicopters, looking for either a new design or a service life-extension programme (SLEP) for the OH-58F. The five helicopters bid for this effort included an OH-58F Block II design from Bell, the AH-6i from Boeing, the AAS-72X armed scout variant of the UH-72 Lakota bid by Eurocopter in conjunction with Lockheed Martin, the MD 540F Cayuse Warrior from MD Helicopters and the AW169 AAS from AgustaWestland. However, evaluations by the US Army concluded that none of these aircraft met its requirements, while funding issues related to US Congressional sequestration cuts contributed to the AAS effort being terminated in late 2013. The US Army’s last Kiowa Warrior helicopters were retired in January 2017.
The FARA programme
By the time the FARA programme was launched in 2018 as part of the US Army’s wider Future Vertical Lift (FVL) portfolio, which also includes the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) programme, the Army was no longer averse to exploring rotary-wing technologies beyond a conventional helicopter design. The FARA effort thus saw Sikorsky’s Raider X, a compound helicopter design with two coaxial rotors and a single pusher propeller, along with the tandem-cockpit Bell 360 Invictus, a design featuring a four-blade rotor with high-speed articulating blades along with wings to create lift when the aircraft is travelling at speed, downselected from a larger field in March 2020.
However, testing of these aircraft was delayed by the late arrival of the Army-stipulated Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP) powerplant, meaning they never actually flew in the required configuration.
The requirements for FARA competitive prototypes were relatively few, with the main ones being a maximum speed of at least 333 km/h (180 kt), a maximum rotor diameter of 12.2 m (40 ft), a maximum gross weight of 6,350 kg (14,000 lb), and a requirement for it to be powered by the ITEP engine.
Yet as Bell and Sikorsky developed their FARA contenders as truly innovative rotary-wing aircraft designs, the 21st century battlefield had changed considerably from the environment in which the RAH-66 Comanche was expected to operate. The effective use of armed UAVs in recent conflicts, such as the Bayraktar TB2 in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020 and the same year in the Libyan Civil War, as well as the increased use of UAVs in the ongoing war in Ukraine, had changed the paradigm of the armed reconnaissance mission considerably. US Army planners will also have taken note of the heavy Russian helicopter losses in the first stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Meanwhile, the increasing sophistication and availability of space-based reconnaissance assets to conduct surveillance of hostile territory has continued to grow in recent years. Thus, when the FARA programme was terminated in February 2024, it may well have been less surprising than the demise of the armed reconnaissance helicopter programmes that went before it.
Moving on
At an Association of the US Army (AUSA) media roundtable held in Arlington, Virginia, on 4 September 2024, senior leaders from the US Army Aviation community addressed a range of questions from defence media that included going back over the FARA cancellation.
Major General Clair Gill, Commanding General of the US Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Novosel, acknowledged that a capability gap still exists following the retirement of the Kiowa Warrior fleet in 2017. “The reconnaissance gap is still there,” the general noted. “The FARA was specifically built to address that gap and what we’re looking at now is how we mitigate it with other things, so what can we do with what we have and what other things might we buy [or] develop short of a major weapon system like a new aircraft.”
Brigadier General Cain Baker, Director of the FVL Cross-Functional Team at Army Futures Command, stated that FARA “was always about launched effects: extend those sensors forward, get inside that threat, be able to sense it, and target it and destroy it. “When we talk about this layered reconnaissance approach with all our unmanned aerial systems,” added Gen Baker, “this nested ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] approach is critical in covering a portion of the sky. What we’re working through now is ‘How do we deliver launched effects at the end of the tactical battlefield and even extend further out?’”
Asked by a member of the defence press if there are still things in the FARA domain that a manned platform could do that a UAV could not, Gen Gill replied, “Absolutely. Having a man in the loop is always a dynamic capability that you have. It’s someone in the environment with the people that they’re supporting, so they’re talking to them on the radio; they’re seeing what they’re seeing, they can feel the emotion of the battlefield, they can look and see other things that are not necessarily just on a screen, and they can do multiple missions. So they might be doing reconnaissance, they might be able to provide fire support, they might be able to provide CASEVAC [casualty evacuation], so there’s always a dynamic that humans bring to it.”
Gen Gill qualified this, however, by noting that “There’s also a lot of vulnerabilities that humans bring to it. Machines don’t get tired, machines don’t make mistakes unless they’re programmed to make mistakes; machines don’t run out of their duty cycle; they don’t need to eat. So we have a saying: ‘If its thirty dollar dangerous, we probably ought to put a machine on it’ – at least first. And then if you need a thinking person that has experience, has a little bit of situational awareness, then you introduce the human.”
As they look to future programmes, the two companies that developed FARA platforms remain philosophical. Addressing questions from ESD, the team at Bell noted on 12 September, “A key piece of the US Army’s FVL effort was developing a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) that would be integrated on both the FARA and FLRAA weapon systems. Even with the cancellation of FARA, MOSA remains critical. The work we’ve done to understand MOSA remains relevant and will inform our efforts on FLRAA.”
Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky business responded in a similar vein. “Advancements and lessons learned from FARA are applied to other efforts,” a Sikorsky spokesperson told ESD on 17 November 2023. “We continue to partner with the US Army to provide technology transfer and data benefitting current and future Army Aviation development efforts, including Black Hawk modernisation, such as technology transfer to the US Army’s aviation portfolio such as the Modular Open System Approach, Launched Effects and ITEP integration.”
“Over the years and through investment and rigorous flight testing with multiple X2 aircraft,” the Sikorsky spokesperson added, “we believe that our X2 aircraft will bring to bear the strengths of Lockheed Martin, such as digital thread, model-based system engineering, advanced manufacturing, sustainment, training, and weapon and mission system development, to provide an integrated rotorcraft system that combines speed, range, manoeuvrability, survivability and operational flexibility.”
In the final analysis, the demise of armed reconnaissance helicopter programmes might be no bad thing; most obviously, it may well indicate that technology has advanced to the extent that a FARA-type mission no longer requires a crewed rotary-wing platform to be put in harm’s way. Meanwhile, with US Army thinking likely to influence the planning of other Western army aviation commands, it seems likely that the manufacturers of hobbyist construction kits will increasingly add to their portfolios models of UAVs rather than new armed reconnaissance helicopters.
Peter Felstead