Next-Generation Rotorcraft Capability (NGRC)

RavenOne said:
And the interesting bit in the article 'However, there are three outsiders in the mix as well, with bids received from Lithuanian company Jetcopter, Canada-based Bornea Dynamics, and, somewhat surprisingly, Deloitte – the international accountancy and consultancy firm.'
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Well, Deloitte make their money by winning a consultancy contract, pitching a fantastic sounding set of changes with a superb set of powerpoints and then not hanging around for the result. I can see the attraction in military procurement, they can make an initial pitch, get the consultancy contract and then bail before being expected to have to actually make anything.
 
Interesting that the NGRC requirements are for only 12-16 troops and a ~5m long cabin. So they’re not asking for any more internal carrying capacity than an NH90 - not even clear that a rear ramp is required.

So my idea of an S-92 sized cabin is probably off. Removing the rear ramp does make a Racer-like solution with pusher props less problematic.

I imagine everyone is going to have trouble with the folding footprint requirement…
 
H_K said:
Interesting that the NGRC requirements are for only 12-16 troops and a ~5m long cabin. So they’re not asking for any more internal carrying capacity than an NH90 - not even clear that a rear ramp is required.

So my idea of an S-92 sized cabin is probably off. Removing the rear ramp does make a Racer-like solution with pusher props less problematic.

I imagine everyone is going to have trouble with the folding footprint requirement…
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I suspect that two of the parameters in play with this decision are 1. cost (prime consideration), and 2. the desire to move only the smallest tactical unit in the platform. A senior infantry non-commissioned officer once told me "I can react better to the loss of a squad than I can of an entire platoon."
 

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Good news for Airbus and the rotorcraft technologies and engineers of France, Germany, and the other European countries. Like the US, I would not be surprised to see the technologies of the NGRC spread across the continent. I suspect that the RACER will be the basis for the eventual design. Given its rapid achievements it would be surprising to see other options arise.
 
To add some additional context, it was not just Airbus that was awarded a contract - Leonardo and Sikorsky were as well.

Airbus, Leonardo, Sikorsky Selected For NATO NGRC Studies | Aviation Week Network

NSPA issued a tender for three contracts with industry to deliver up to six rotorcraft concepts that could meet the current NGRC specifications.
aviationweek.com aviationweek.com

Airbus’ headline makes it sound as though they were tapped to lead NGRC as a whole, when in reality they are one of three who were awarded to continue studies.
 
donnage99 said:
I heard European pilots biologically have testicles placed much deeper within their crotch, allowing for a higher tolerance of vibration so maybe sikorsky might actually win something this time
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It's not just the balls that Raider and Defiant hammered during flight test. So many organs in the human body don't like massive vibrations... and that's assuming the cockpit displays can even be read.
 
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Well as exciting as this will be, it is pretty obvious to me as to what to expect from the three competing teams. Lockheed Martin/Sikorsky changed the door layout on the Raider X and thus have a prototype in need of an engine [Sefran(?)]. I will be very surprised if RACER is not the option presented by Airbus. Leonardo I suspect will either propose a variation of the 609 or be announced as the developer of a European Future Long Range Assault Aircraft in conjunction with Bell.

There is a chance that there are other options that could be arrived at, but given our current aversion to risk, these options are about as radical as I think western nation states are willing to go.
 
yasotay said:
Well as exciting as this will be, it is pretty obvious to me as to what to expect from the three competing teams. Lockheed Martin/Sikorsky changed the door layout on the Raider X and thus have a prototype in need of an engine [Sefran(?)]. I will be very surprised if RACER is not the option presented by Airbus. Leonardo I suspect will either propose a variation of the 609 or be announced as the developer of a European Future Long Range Assault Aircraft in conjunction with Bell.

There is a chance that there are other options that could be arrived at, but given our current aversion to risk, these options are about as radical as I think western nation states are willing to go.
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I thought the 609 was explicitly prohibited from military developments?
 
Given the vulnerability of current helicopter drive systems to gunfire and high + rising cost of especially military grade helicopters see NH-90 for instance, it would seem "assault" and "helicopter" in the same title would either be short sighted or deceptive. "Assault Aircraft" even more off the mark.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I thought the 609 was explicitly prohibited from military developments?
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That may be true, but a derivative of the 609 might get past the legalize. However, having thought about it a bit more I will have to agree with @Moose that it is likely that the 609 is really too small. Leonardo has been doing considerable work with larger tilt rotor for Clear Sky efforts, so that may be the genesis of a wholly Italian platform. The idea that the Bell FLRAA aircraft could be the start point is compelling.
 
yasotay said:
That may be true, but a derivative of the 609 might get past the legalize. However, having thought about it a bit more I will have to agree with @Moose that it is likely that the 609 is really too small. Leonardo has been doing considerable work with larger tilt rotor for Clear Sky efforts, so that may be the genesis of a wholly Italian platform. The idea that the Bell FLRAA aircraft could be the start point is compelling.
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The 609 is far too small... it was designed to land on pads that could handle a 412 and an aircraft that meets the NGRC requirements will be ~30,000+ lb instead of ~17,000 lb MGW. The 609 rotor controls aren't suitable for a military platform and much of the hardware is 25 years old at this point. Anything for NGRC will be a clean sheet design or based on FLRAA, if the sizing requirements align.
 
Just seen press release in my inbox

' Leonardo's Cascina Costa (Varese, Italy) site, the first ground run, with rotor testing, of the Next Generation Civil Tiltrotor (NGCTR) Technology Demonstrator (TD) took place. The next phase of the programme involves intensive testing in the coming months, with the aim of performing the first flight by the end of 2024 and then accumulating 200 flight hours to expand operational capabilities in helicopter and aircraft modes.'

www.leonardo.com

Successfully performed the first ground run test of the NGCTR’s Technology Demonstrator

The next phase of the programme involves intensive testing in the coming months, with the aim of achieving the first flight by the end of 2024
www.leonardo.com www.leonardo.com

1722629031703.png

cheers
 
RavenOne said:
Just seen press release in my inbox

' Leonardo's Cascina Costa (Varese, Italy) site, the first ground run, with rotor testing, of the Next Generation Civil Tiltrotor (NGCTR) Technology Demonstrator (TD) took place. The next phase of the programme involves intensive testing in the coming months, with the aim of performing the first flight by the end of 2024 and then accumulating 200 flight hours to expand operational capabilities in helicopter and aircraft modes.'

www.leonardo.com

Successfully performed the first ground run test of the NGCTR’s Technology Demonstrator

The next phase of the programme involves intensive testing in the coming months, with the aim of achieving the first flight by the end of 2024
www.leonardo.com www.leonardo.com

View attachment 735872

cheers
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Well, it's got Valor engine pods on it, but the body looks more 609. interesting...

Wonder if this will actually get approved for civil flight?
 
I very much suspect that the Leonardo NGCTR will look a lot like the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA). A lot of discussion was observed at Farnborough, in the Bell chalet between Leonardo, UK and Netherlands with Bell. As mentioned in the FVL thread there is a lot of good reasons for this eventuality to be realized.
 
yasotay said:
I will be very surprised if RACER is not the option presented by Airbus.
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Seems like Airbus is putting forward 2 concepts for NGRC, and Racer is not necessarily their favored option. The 2 concepts are:
  • A conventional helo optimized for nap of the earth flying at 180+ knots
  • A faster, longer ranged 220 knot helo based on Racer technology
www.flightglobal.com

Airbus Helicopters lines up twin-track approach to NATO next-generation rotorcraft concept studies

Airbus Helicopters will submit two concept studies to NATO's Next Generation Rotorcraft Capability project - a conventional high-speed helicopter and a design based around the airframer's Racer compound technology.
www.flightglobal.com www.flightglobal.com

David Alfano, who heads the NGRC activity at Airbus Helicopters, says the conventional rotorcraft will still be capable of meeting the project’s minimum speed requirement of 180kt (333km/h) without the need for significant architectural changes. This could be achieved through aerodynamic and main rotor improvements, plus “big engines” that will each need to deliver “most likely beyond” 3,000shp (2,237kW).
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"180kt can be reached pretty easily with a high-speed helicopter which is comfortable enough to be manouverable,” he says.

Alfano says the feedback from nations involved in NGRC is that the optimum speed is around 200kt, slightly slower than the 220kt upper limit suggested in the project’s initial attributes document. Driving that is operator demand to perform “real nap of the earth flights – below 50ft, between the trees” to enhance survivability, requiring highly advanced sensors and a next-generation cockpit rather than pure speed."
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However, Airbus Helicopters is also developing a Racer-based concept should the NGRC nations instead decide that their priorities are speed and range. A compound architecture also brings other advantages such as enhanced manouverability, a lower noise signature, and the ability to carry weapon or sensor payloads on the wings.

While declining to disclose details of the design, Alfano says the company “will have to adjust” elements of the Racer, a civil demonstrator, to meet “military needs”. “We know that we have some key design features to change to make it really military.”
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But in addition to speed “you need payload and range”, he says. “It is useless to have a high-speed helicopter with no payload – you are just warning adversaries in that case. “From our point of view, we are working more on range and survivability and for speed we are just answering the threshold – we don’t fight to be the fastest.”

Alfano says the two concepts will have a high degree of commonality, sharing the “most difficult or expensive items” such as engines and transmission and potentially the cockpit and centre fuselage. How operators prioritise other attributes, such as transportability or the need to fit on certain landing decks, will also influence the eventual design
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Is that a consequence of why we haven't heard about Racer since its fishing* expedition in the Med?

*chasing records fishingly in the absence of rigorous safety protocol.
 
I am not surprised with Airbus's approach in that a majority of European nations do not need speed and range as priorities given the relatively compressed military environment. Clearly Airbus is also concerned about range, as some of its prime customers do have long range requirements.
 
But the Tilt-rotors configuration is all about speed AND range. And tilt-rotor will probably dominate the futur of the long range military market...
Do I am the only one to see this duality would be a sign of an erroneous take on market requirements?
It's not about having a minimal speed of 200kt, it's about extending mission reach of Helo.
 
Problem is not all missions require range or speed, outside of the 2 obvious ones (personnel recovery & special forces).

In fact for typical army operations (i.e. air assault, transport), a cheaper conventional helo with more payload is likely the better tradeoff, especially if survivability is equal or better (nap of the earth flight at 180-200kts vs. flight at a few hundred or thousand feet at 220-260kts).

Navies also will likely prefer conventional helos with a compact footprint, as they don't really need the speed and want good hover behavior.

...so Airbus appears to be telling the users that they need to make some hard choices on which missions (and which branch of the armed forces) to prioritize.
 
I will only disagree with @H_K in that Tilt Rotor become more viable when distances over 100NM/185KM are more routine, as you might find in Africa, Middle East, or the Pacific.

I think Airbus is looking at markets who want to update but have no need for the expense of tilt rotor. There may also be a rational on their part that it might be too expensive for them to chase Bell and Leonardo when it comes to tilt rotor technology and engineering. They have world leading helicopter expertise (by market share at least) and so are playing their strong suite.


In some ways it appears that Sikorsky is in agreement with Airbus.
 
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yasotay said:
I will only disagree with @H_K in that Tilt Rotor become more viable when distances over 100NM/185KM are more routine, as you might find in Africa, Middle East, or the Pacific.
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I wonder if there's also a "mild hybrid" option, which would be a conventional helicopter with only some Racer features to improve range and fly at 180-200kts? e.g.
  • Include an optional box wing kit to increase lift and range. This also would have other benefits like providing attachment points for weapons. Make it detachable for easier air transportability.
  • Retain Racer's low drag rotor hub (which also provides some useful lift augmentation)
  • Other aerodynamic tweaks... assymetric tail boom and H160-style biplane stabilizer
  • Ecomode on 1 engine for long range cruise at 120-140kts
  • Include all the latest innovations in materials... composite fuselage, lightweight windshield, replace hydraulics with electric (e.g. landing gear mechanism) etc
But ditch Racer's complex lateral propellers and shaft lines, retaining a conventional tail rotor instead?
 
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There would be indeed duty helicopters and those for force projection. Helicopters that principally use vertical flight and those that are prioritized for range.
The middle ground is in cost and then will evolve in time and with technology ;)
 
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H_K said:
I wonder if there's also a "mild hybrid" option, which would be a conventional helicopter with only some Racer features to improve range and fly at 180-200kts? e.g.
  • Include an optional box wing kit to increase lift and range. This also would have other benefits like providing attachment points for weapons. Make it detachable for easier air transportability.
  • Retain Racer's low drag rotor hub (which also provides some useful lift augmentation)
  • Other aerodynamic tweaks... assymetric tail boom and H160-style biplane stabilizer
  • Ecomode on 1 engine for long range cruise at 120-140kts
  • Include all the latest innovations in materials... composite fuselage, lightweight windshield, replace hydraulics with electric (e.g. landing gear mechanism) etc
But ditch Racer's complex lateral propellers and shaft lines, retaining a conventional tail rotor instead?
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The issue with Racer's layout is that the props are right where people need to be. With Sikorsky's ABC or even a traditional Compound Helo like the Cheyenne, the prop is at the very tail, so it's relatively easy to keep people away from that.

Personally, I'd want to stick the Racer's props into small ring ducts, just to keep people from being able to walk into the prop. Yes, that would increase the amount of wing structure and amount of rotor disk blocked.

As to a purely conventional helo, well, the Lynx with BERP tips maxed out at 400kph/216kts. So the 180-200kts in the weeds is doable by a conventional helo, but comes at the expense of range. It'd take a lot of fuel to feed the big engines needed for this.
 
H_K said:
I wonder if there's also a "mild hybrid" option, which would be a conventional helicopter with only some Racer features to improve range and fly at 180-200kts? e.g.
  • Include an optional box wing kit to increase lift and range. This also would have other benefits like providing attachment points for weapons. Make it detachable for easier air transportability.
  • Retain Racer's low drag rotor hub (which also provides some useful lift augmentation)
  • Other aerodynamic tweaks... assymetric tail boom and H160-style biplane stabilizer
  • Ecomode on 1 engine for long range cruise at 120-140kts
  • Include all the latest innovations in materials... composite fuselage, lightweight windshield, replace hydraulics with electric (e.g. landing gear mechanism) etc
But ditch Racer's complex lateral propellers and shaft lines, retaining a conventional tail rotor instead?
Click to expand...

Speaking of solutions retaining a "conventional" tail rotor:
I have said this several times before: I really do wonder why none of the major rotorcraft manufacturers is considering a swiveling tail rotor. Sikorsky had a demonstrator and some concepts floating around long time ago (Rotoprop)... And recently Karem actually proposed one for FARA.
 

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VTOLicious said:
Speaking of solutions retaining a "conventional" tail rotor:
I have said this several times before: I really do wonder why none of the major rotorcraft manufacturers is considering a swiveling tail rotor. Sikorsky had a demonstrator and some concepts floating around long time ago (Rotoprop)... And recently Karem actually proposed one for FARA.
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Karem did indeed and lost out, partially because of it. With little test data available, other than antique Army data, it presented a level of risk undesired by the customer. The U.S. Army who espoused the desire to boldly look at new technology and technique with FARA, demonstrated at the end of the day, it was as risk adverse as ever. Honestly, I think Valor won more on expectation of the USMC joining the effort than on technical superiority.
I also think that Karem lost (like the Boeing F-36(?), because it looked more like an airplane and was greatly different from the OH-58D it was to replace. U.S. Army Aviators are arguably the most conservative group within the service. There is an old saying; "Ask three Aviators their opinion, and you will get five answers."

Back around on the topic of Airbus NGRC proposals, I think they understand the conservative nature of the customers and are not about risking the company treasury on very adventurous rotorcraft.
 
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How are tilt-rotors still an adventure in Europe?

I am pretty sure it's more about Airbus internal head-shuffling with no-one wanting to admit that they need to restart their approach for a high speed helo nearly from ground*.

*if we consider that Racer demonstration revealed that the concept was not scalable for a military airframe.
 
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Boeing had Canard Rotor Wing which could have revolutionized high-speed rotorcraft if they'd just done 2 simple things.

First, forget the tip-driven rotor (a.k.a. within the CRW group as "rotating baton of fire" when viewed at night) since it involved truly astonishing propulsion system losses even under best-case assumptions, making any vehicle much larger and more expensive than a conventional shaft-driven rotor-plus- NOTAR. We did the studies, we knew the penalties would be drastically reduced by going to conventional shaft drive, but management and a surprising number of tech folks just were enamored of the tip drive and wouldn't consider anything else.

Second, do what your funding customer (Tony Tether at DARPA) said to do after crashing the first X-50A: Get the second ship in the air ASAP, and when/if it crashes too, they had funds for a new prototype that would apply "lessons learned" on the X-50As. Ship Two would have been flightworthy in 2 months according to our manager, but instead nearly a year was spent doing more wind tunnel tests and comparing those results with flight test data and analytical data, before finally putting Ship Two in the air and crashing it too. That delay angered DARPA to the point that they cut ties with the whole CRW idea, giving the future funding to a small company with big impractical ideas about putting a huge rotor on top of a C-130. That went nowhere of course, CRW got a permanent black eye, and nobody today is even willing to talk about a shaft-driven version that would be fast, light, and efficient. (If you remember my posts about Harrier 21, you might recall that this program also had huge potential that was crushed by management decisions. Somebody should write a book.)
 
yasotay said:
@stever_sl - Thanks for the insights. If I recall right Tony T. was not an overly patient fellow.
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Not when you ignored what he told you he wanted you to do with HIS money, at least! I sure can't blame him for that. His advice to Boeing was captured in an article he did for one of the rotorcraft magazines, so everybody in the aviation world knew it, and could see that we were ignoring it. Our managers were just unable to accept risk, even when urged to by the provider of their funding. I don't think they realized that by obsessing about technical risk, they were taking on huge programmatic risk, and as a result CRW died an unnecessary death.
 

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