Instead of Upgrading Helicopters, Army Wants to Upgrade Pilots
The Army has found a solution to fixing its aging helicopter fleet. It doesn’t even require upgrading the helicopters very much, or designing new and more modern ones. Indeed, the helicopters will remain largely the same. It’s the pilots who are getting upgraded.
On Monday, Raytheon received a $4.7 million contract from the Army’s wing for Engineering and Manufacturing Development to develop a wearable computer system for helicopter pilots. Called the Air Soldier system, which the Army hopes to field by 2015, it includes smartphone-sized devices attached to pilots’ wrists and is envisioned as a way to share battlefield information between pilots and troops on the ground. Those devices are then linked to a detachable tablet mounted to an aircraft dashboard.
Behind it all is a brain called the Soldier Computer Module, which is itself planned to be only a quarter of an inch thick and slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes. This comes the same day the military announced it’s spending $7.3 billion on new Black Hawks, which have served as the workhorses of the U.S. helo force since the 1970s.In other words: keep the helicopters, but improve the pilots. Instead of ripping out and redesigning consoles for existing aircraft, and going though costly re-certification, you simply redesign the airmen.
Air Soldier is envisioned as a personal communication and information tool. That could mean tracking where friendly troops are operating, or the location of bad guys an attack chopper needs to destroy, or which areas to avoid if a pilot is forced to abandon his or her aircraft.
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Rolls-Royce lands $183m US Army helicopter contract
The US Army contract, to support 500 M250 engines on more than 300 OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters, will last a year, with the military having the option to extend it for another four years.
Rolls-Royce has supported the Kiowa Warrior fleet for 13 years, with the Kiowa Warriors completing more than 2m flight hours, including more than 750,000 hours in combat.
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