The overhaul includes rethinking the type of aircraft used for training, along with a likely shift to a contractor-owned-and-operated schoolhouse.

“I think I have one sacred responsibility and that is to deliver competent aviators to the government,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence Command, said at an Army aviation conference in Nashville, Tennessee, last month. “I’m not sure that I’m doing that in spades right now.”

The fatal Jan. 29 collision of a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., and a spate of Army aviation mishaps over the last several years have been at the forefront of the minds of Army aviation leaders as they attempt to rein in the crisis and improve aviation safety.

In addition to other efforts to try to reemphasize a culture of rigorous training and safety, the Army began taking a hard look at redeveloping its basic training program at Fort Novosel, Alabama, fueled by the most mishap-heavy years in Army aviation history since 2007.

The Army found inexperienced crews were “out-driving their headlights, out-training the experience that was in their force at whatever level,” then-commander of the AACE, Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, told Defense News on a 2024 trip to Fort Novosel, Alabama, home of Army aviation training.

Now, the Army is in hyperdrive to reimagine how it trains aviators in an increasingly complex world where combat proficiency is waning and experience gaps at the highest levels are growing.

Pivoting the chopper

The motivation to make changes was compounded by the Army’s decision in 2013 to retire its TH-67 training aircraft and replace them with more expensive LUH-72A Lakota light utility twin-engine helicopters.

The decision was a matter of necessity. The Army faced the choice of either needing to comply with congressional sequestration requirements that mandated cutting every program evenly across the board or making tough choices internally to avoid making salami slices across its budget.

But critics worried the Lakota was too exquisite and pricey for basic training.

“It is a very good helicopter,” Gill told Defense News in a recent interview. “But in some cases, it assists the student in things that we wouldn’t want the student assisted in.”

For instance, the automated flight control system “will help you with heading control. If you jumped in a very simple aircraft … if you don’t push the pedal commensurate with how you apply the collective, you will start spinning in a circle and then if you push too much, you go the other way,” Gill said. “So that’s the first time you learn to hover. It’s a little bit of that dance. They don’t have that challenge in the Lakota because it helps them.”

Army aviators coming out of basic training now “don’t have that early struggle, where you really have to kind of learn to control the airplane,” he added.

The easier-to-fly Lakotas are also turning out to be harder to maintain. Airbus, the Lakota’s manufacturer, is headquartered in France. Calling in a company maintenance engineer when a fleet-wide issue needs to be addressed is sometimes up against the tyranny of distance, Gill said.

But Airbus says its lead Lakota program managers based in the U.S. work diligently via phone with the Fort Novosel team “every day to help work through any maintenance issues that arise,” according to an Airbus official.

Airbus Helicopters North America is based in Grand Prairie, Texas, and has offices across the U.S. to include Alabama. Lakota maintenance technicians are located at Fort Novosel along with a senior Airbus program manager. The factory where all Army Lakota are made is in Columbus, Mississippi.

A twin-engine helicopter also requires twice the components.

“You don’t need to be a helicopter pilot or mechanic to understand that there are more things to maintain,” Gill said. “Sometimes that means more things can break.”

The Lakota has cost the Army roughly $3,000 per flight hour, which is nearly the same as the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk, Gill said. Some of the training aircraft that the Army is taking a look at now could potentially cost between $500 and $1,300 an hour.

In 2020, the Army commissioned a study through Boston Consulting Group that determined the service could save “hundreds of millions of dollars” by transitioning to a single-engine trainer.

An additional study with a College of William & Mary MBA fellowship program determined that a contractor-owned, contractor-operated, or COCO, model would be preferable to the current government-owned and operated method.

Boston Consulting has been rehired, Gill said, to dive deeper into a business case analysis for a basic aviator training COCO model.

Course correction

The Army is now running a pilot program with Robinson Helicopter that began at the beginning of April where it is sending some of its current flight students to Marianna, Florida, to learn to fly using a Robinson R66 helicopter and to go through a Federal Aviation Administration private pilot training program.

As part of the program, the students will log five solo flight hours. An FAA private helicopter certification requires 10 hours.

“I think that flying in that unsupervised fashion is just critically important to the development of the mature aviator that we expect we would generate out of the world’s greatest flight training program. The FAA is doing it, why in the world wouldn’t we do it with Army aviators,” Gill said.

“So the question is what’s going to happen on the back end of that final program? Are we going to produce a less proficient aviator than I’m building at Fort Novosel in the UH-72,” Gill asked.

“I’m very interested in what this pilot program is going to tell us,” he said.

Should the Army choose a COCO model to train its aviators, much of the daily headaches schoolhouse leaders face would transfer to the company hired to train them.

“The brilliance of the COCO model is that it’s not my thing to worry about,” Gill said. “Now all I say is, ‘I want 1,350 pilots at the end of the year; you figure out how.’”

The number of helicopters needed in the fleet, maintenance requirements, the number of instructor pilots and their experience levels and every other aspect of training aviators will be determined by an industry partner.

Industry will need to come with the tools that produce solid aviators.

“The need for better stick and rudder skills is at the core of both battle readiness and even just safety,” David Smith, Robinson Helicopter CEO, told Defense News in a recent interview. “We talk about a high degree of automation in some of these products that doesn’t produce a great stick and rudder aviator.”

Opting for a simpler helicopter, like the R66, will also “drastically reduce the cost,” Smith said, “because our products just don’t have as many things that can fail, so they tend to be more reliable in service.”

Textron’s Bell is also looking to get back into the Army aviation training game after the service retired its TH-67 in favor of the Lakota.

“We fully intend to give them a turnkey contractor-owned, contractor-operated flight school solution,” Carl Coffman, Bell’s vice president of military sales and strategy, told Defense News at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference last month.

Bell is pitching its 505 Jet Ranger X as part of the package, but Coffman said, “We’re not trying to sell the Army an aircraft. I’m trying to sell you a service.”

Lockheed Martin also announced last month it would be pitching a turnkey solution.

Spooling up the rotors

The Army spends roughly $1.5 billion to run its flight school annually and produces 1,350 aviators, Gill said.

To transition to a new flight program, the Army will have to, for a time, pay to keep Lakotas in the fleet, he acknowledged.

“The challenge for the Army is, in order to do this, it costs more money up front,” he said.

The Army announced last month it would be ending some programs, consolidating commands and restructuring formations, including eliminating 11 air cavalry squadrons from the force.

Gill sees opportunity in the elimination of those squadrons. Money freed from operational flight hours could potentially go toward training hours instead.

Industry also has to be prepared to “own a good amount of the risk,” in addition to the funding the Army would provide to establish the new training program, Gill said.

The Army wants to move quickly to establish the program. Gill said the plan is to release a draft request for proposals this month. Another industry day will be held in July where companies can bring their capabilities for demonstration opportunities.

Then the service will release a final request for proposal in the fall or winter of calendar year 2025 and evaluate proposals in 2026.

“I would like to get this thing going early in [fiscal] 2027,” Gill said.

Companies have estimated they could likely get a program up and running within two years, but Gill said he has directed industry to try to truncate that timeline by half.

“We cannot do this fast enough,” he said.

This story has been updated to include comment from Airbus on its maintenance efforts and U.S. based organization.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll issued memos within a day of each other earlier this month announcing major changes to command structure and formations and changes to acquisition and modernization efforts, including canceling programs while boosting others.

But, despite the surprise, leaders across the aviation branch said they are embracing change and working to shape the role aviation will play in future operations.

The announcement from the top “was a little abrupt,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Novosel, Alabama, told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee, last week.

“Some of the decisions that were made were not exactly what we had proposed, but they were decisions in the context of the folks in the Pentagon who are looking at the entirety of the Army budget, the priority systems which are not all aviation-centric,” Gill said.

“I would even argue that we’re not the Army’s priority. We’re looking at air-and-missile defense, counter-[unmanned aircraft systems], UAS protection,” he said, adding that with a fixed budget, decisions on what to prioritize are tougher.

“It’s no surprise that the Army made some tough cuts. Some of them were just maybe deeper than we thought they were going to be,” Gill said.

Some portions of the restructuring effort demonstrate how the Army is looking to transform its aviation capability, which begins with divesting old equipment. The service was already deep into that effort, Gill noted.

Toward the end of 2023, the Army decided to trim its UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter fleet by 8%. Months later, it canceled its Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft competition before selecting a winner to build prototypes. It also divested its Lima and Victor model UH-60s in favor of modernizing the service’s most capable variant, the Mike model.

The service was already working on ways to end the AH-64 Delta-model Apache attack helicopter fleet and move over to a pure fleet of the most modernized version, the Echo-model.

“All the Army Transformation Initiative did was accelerate,” Gill said. “They made some very clear decisions that sort of answered a bunch of [requests for information] that we had.”

As part of the new cuts, the Army has decided to end procurement of the Gray Eagle UAS for the active force, cancel a competitive effort to replace the Shadow UAS with a new Future Tactical UAS and halve the number of new spy planes it planned to buy as part of the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, program.

The Army also said it plans to cease developing the Improved Turbine Engine Program, a decades-long effort to replace the engines in Black Hawks and Apaches. The ITEP engine powered a Black Hawk in a hover for the first time last week.

The Army also plans to inactivate one air cavalry squadron per combat aviation brigade in the active component and said it would cancel the planned activation of the 12th CAB, according to an Army execution order obtained by Defense News.

Aviation leadership had “teed up a number of options” related to equipment and formations and had already shared them with Army leadership, Gill said. The branch was supposed to head into an Army Requirements Oversight Council meeting this month with some of those proposals.

“I think with some of those proposals, all this did was accelerate a whole bunch of staff churn and just say, ‘Hey, here’s where we are,’” he said.

Even so, Gill noted, “We only got this two weeks ago, and so we don’t know all the details of it.”

“I think our job, collectively, as is the case for the rest of the Army, is to do mission analysis on what we were told to do and then provide options to senior leaders, and in some cases, it’ll be ways that we can execute exactly what they told us to do. And it might be even like, you know, saying, ‘Hey, here are all the consequences. Is that still the order?’”

While some decisions may have been surprising, Army aviation leaders said they acknowledge the need for change across the service.

“We need to divest faster, and we need to iterate and procure and probably continue to iterate and procure on newer technologies that we think are emerging, given the context of the operating environment that we see both east and west of us,” Gill said.

One of the newer priorities for the Army within the aviation portfolio is to accelerate the service’s planned procurement of a Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, which Textron’s Bell is building in the prototyping phase. The goal now is to try to deliver some production-level platforms to soldiers by 2028 instead of in 2031.

The Army is also planning to focus on developing and rapidly fielding UAS and launched effects across the force to operate at different echelons and across a wide variety of mission sets.

As Army aviation becomes a more complex array of manned, unmanned and uncrewed systems, branch leadership is working to design a force that relies more heavily on sending drones forward on the battlefield rather than manned aircraft to do some of the missions manned aircraft used to do, like armed reconnaissance.

As part of an initiative begun by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George over a year ago, the service started a “transformation in contact” initiative where units were given new capabilities and free rein to use them extensively during exercises to see what works and what doesn’t and how new equipment might work in various formations. A large focus of the effort was on bringing UAS into the fold at the brigade level.

George also pushed for a new, more flexible way to fund UAS procurement rapidly and more often.

The aviation branch is “absolutely changing the ways we’ve been doing business,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation, said at the Army Aviation Association of America conference last week.

“We’re executing in ways that we haven’t before by building these tranches of capability a lot faster and that’s in every level of UAS space today,” Phillips said.

“We always joke that two things change the outcome of programs … elections and wars,” Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, the Army’s G-3/5/7 aviation director, said. “We just had an election and we’ll have another in four years and we’ll have a change of Congress in two years. All of those things impact … our ability to do what the Army wants to do and we have to work within that constraint,” he added.

“I think you’ll see some of that play out here over the next few months,” Braman noted.

The men received the high honor May 15 at the 2025 Army Aviation Mission Solutions Summit hosted by the Army Aviation Association of America in Nashville, Tennessee. The cross is the fourth highest award for military valor.

The pilots and weapons operators originally received Air Medals with “V” devices for valor following the historic mission. Retired Gen. Richard “Dick” Cody served as battalion commander for the unit — the 1st Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment — during Desert Storm.

Cody worked for multiple years to secure upgrades to the medals for the aviators, who were part of Task Force Normandy, according to an Army release.

Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commanding general of the Aviation Center of Excellence and the Aviation branch chief, presented the awards to the aviators.

“This is one of those truly significant moments for us, both as an Army and as an Aviation branch,” Gill said. “Every one of us who joins the Army looks to those who came before us. We need to use these example setters as people we should recognize and honor and then replicate the commitment that they made on that night of January 17, 1991.”

The task force of eight Army AH-64 Apache helicopters and four Air Force MH-53J Pave Low helicopters were divided into two teams for the mission, Red Team and White Team.

The Distinguished Flying Cross recipients from Red Team are: Chief Warrant Officer 4 Lewis Hall, Warrant Officer Jerry Orsburn, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Shawn Hoban, Warrant Officer Tim Vincent, Chief Warrant Officer 3 James Miller, Warrant Officer Jody Bridgeforth, Capt. Newman Shufflebarger and Chief Warrant Officer 3 Tim Roderick.

From White Team, they are: Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dave Jones, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Tip O’Neill, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Ronald Rodriguez, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Lee Miller, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Tim Zarnowski, Lt. Tom Drew, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Brian Stewmon and Lt. Col. Dick Cody.

The teams destroyed two Iraqi early warning radar sites 22 minutes before H-hour, which disabled the adversary’s air defenses and established a 20-mile wide air corridor in the first minutes of the air campaign.

The Apache crews launched 27 Hellfire missile, hundreds of rockets and thousands of rounds of 30mm ammunition during the mission, according to the release.

The citation for their awards said the men “displayed heroic actions” during the 15-hour mission, which occurred in darkness, 90 miles into enemy territory.

“The eight crews of Task Force Normandy fired the first shots of Desert Storm leading to the destruction of the Iraqi radar and ground control sites and officially kickstarted the allied air campaign,” the citation reads.

Army leadership has tasked itself to accelerate the fielding of FLRAA as part of a newly debuted transformation initiative. And while speeding up any major procurement program contains substantial risk, Army aviation leaders and Textron’s Bell, the company chosen to build the service’s brand new advanced tiltrotor, say the program is unique in the sense that significant risk was driven down through digital design, engineering and a technology demonstration effort, where it flew the V-280 Valor tiltrotor for over 200 hours.

“Normally you would build prototypes, then you would go to test,” Poquette said. “And during test, you’re not doing a whole lot of building. You’re testing the aircraft and you’re building up a body of engineering work and results [ahead of] a Milestone C [production] decision.”

Typically, programs are in testing with prototypes for roughly two years prior to production decisions.

“We’re not going to accelerate testing. We’re not going to accelerate design,” he said. “They’re already very compressed, but what we can do is assume a little bit of risk and say, well maybe we can build aircraft during test.”

With the test effort going on in the background with the eight prototypes that will have already been built, Bell would begin building production aircraft, he said.

In 2027, the Army plans to make an early production decision ahead of Milestone C. The service is able to do so because there is already an option built into the current contract with Bell to exercise a low-rate production lot.

While concurrency — when a program chooses to produce systems before proving final design out through the testing program — has led to program delays and, in some cases, demise, Bell and the Army are confident this time is different.

Bell has assured the Army that it is “very confident” in its digital engineering to the point that, “although it may not be perfect, it’ll be pretty close,” Poquette said.

“It’s a continuation of production from our prototypes into early production representative aircraft,” Ryan Ehinger, Bell’s FLRAA program manager, said. “And it’s a second iteration. We did the [Joint Multirole Technology Demonstrator]. That was a one-off aircraft. We’ve been doing manufacturing development from then through now in some of these advanced manufacturing technologies and techniques.”

Bell also builds critical components like the wing, the blades and the gear boxes, he added.

“We’ve got our manufacturing technology center that has been iterating for years on some of these designs,” he said.

Another lever the Army plans to try to pull to accelerate fielding is completing full-rate production in four or five years rather than in seven or eight.

“What we’re asking Bell to do is build capacity faster to get to a full-rate production,” Poquette said. “That means we get a company a year earlier, but we get a battalion 18 months earlier and we get two battalions 30 months earlier.”

While the original plan was to conduct the initial operational test program in late FY31, the Army could also be able to enter that phase more quickly because it will already have aircraft built, according to Poquette.

The IOT&E could potentially begin in the FY28 or FY29 time period.

While it knows what it doesn’t want, the service is still trying to figure out exactly what it does want and how to acquire capability rapidly.

“It’s not that we don’t want a Future Tactical UAS. It’s just the one that was being developed didn’t meet our needs,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference.

As part of a larger directive issued by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to make major changes to structure, formations and programs, the Army decided to cancel the FTUAS program just as two vendors had just wrapped up a competitive flight demonstration phase.

“There’s a misnomer of, ‘We’ve killed FTUAS,’” Mingus said. “We still need short, medium, long-range unmanned systems that can sense, they can see, they can extend the network, they can kill, they’re kinetic, they’re [electronic warfare], they do all those things and so we’re still going to invest in systems like that.”

The decision comes after the Army approved just one year ago the characteristics it wants in an FTUAS and awarding contracts to two teams competing to build the drone.

The long road to replace Shadow

The Army has been trying to replace its Shadow UAS fleet for years but officially retired it in early 2024. The service then looked to figure out how to possibly accelerate a fielding timetable for FTUAS, but there wasn’t enough funding available to move more quickly, then-director of Army aviation at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen, said last year at AAAA.

The service invested money in fiscal 2025 to buy prototypes from both Griffon Aerospace and Textron and fly them over the next few years.

“The goodness about FTUAS is going to be the plug-and-play things … that you can put on it,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gringrich, Army G-8, said in an interview a year ago.

“The ability to put on a network extension, the ability to put a, potentially in the future, lethal payload. [Electro-Optical Infrared] sensors, [electronic warfare],” he listed.

Among key characteristics for the FTUAS, in addition to rapid capability insertions, the Army wants the aircraft to be runway independent, have on-the-move command-and-control and soldier-led field level maintenance.

The Army began considering requirements for a replacement for its Textron-made Shadow drone in 2018. By 2019, it had narrowed the pool of competitors to a Martin UAV-Northrop Grumman team, Textron Systems, L3Harris Technologies and Arcturus UAV. Aerovironment purchased Arcturus in 2021, while Shield AI bought Martin UAV in the same year.

The service evaluated the four drone offerings with operational units over the period of a year, culminating in a spring 2021 rodeo at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Army awarded Aerovironment an $8 million contract in August 2022 to provide the Jump 20 UAS as an interim FTUAS capability for a single brigade.

The Army had planned to field FTUAS to the first unit equipped in 2026.

Technology worth saving

The service’s project officer for UAS was asked to put together three courses of action within 30 days to the Army’s acquisition branch to stop current FTUAS development, Col. Danielle Medaglia, the project manager for Army UAS, said at AAAA. Those were due May 14.

“Right now the plan is we’re going to continue the developmental tests. We’re doing that with both vendors and, from there, the Army is going to make a decision whether we want to just provide them the jump start [to] the Brigade [directed requirement] and they’re also, hey, we have to transfer that technology,” Medaglia said.

“There is some new technology on that, in that Group 3 space that both vendors brought to bear and there’s no way the Army would lose out on that,” she added, “so how we transfer that technology is a really, really big deal.”

While Griffon did not participate in the first round of FTUAS demonstrations when the Army opened the competition back up to industry again in 2023, the company had already been quietly working on its solution, keeping in mind the size and modularity the Army really needed to accommodate the sensors and effects it wants on such a platform.

“We really view ourselves as building aerial pickup trucks because in the world of UAS, the actual air vehicle should be the thing you think about the least while conducting a mission,” Jordan French, Griffon program manager for tactical UAS, told Defense News in a recent interview.

“The air vehicle is certainly the most critical piece because if you don’t have it, you can’t do the mission,” he added. “That being said, operators must have complete confidence in the air vehicle so they can stay focused on the mission and the other critical components of the UAS that apply effects and situational awareness.”

Griffon has focused deeply on its modular open-system architecture and its interfaces, so in the instance a customer wants something, whatever it is, it’s essentially plug-and-play, French explained.

The technology of the airframe also departs from the typical hybrid quadcopter or tail-sitter platform that’s often seen among Group 3-sized UAS, which weigh less than 1,320 pounds.

“We took a complete clean sheet approach,” French said.

The company focused on developing a system that used a series hybrid, combining an internal combustion engine with an electric motor. The aircraft also features four tiltrotors.

“The powerful thing about our tiltrotors is the ability to thrust vector our propulsion forces,” French said. “So instead of like a quad copter having to rely on just RPM to yaw or pitch and roll the aircraft, you can actually keep the wings level and use dynamic thrust vectoring to maneuver the aircraft in hover and through transitions to forward flight.”

The series-hybrid capability also allows the UAS to operate silently, which is a departure from the RQ-7b Shadow engine’s lawn-mower-like acoustic signature.

“At only a few 100 yards away, Valiant is virtually silent,” French said.

Should the Army decide to buy more systems at a larger scale, “Griffon has completed all of the major milestones of the current rapid prototyping effort and is already in production for other customers and ready to begin production for FTUAS,” French said.

Griffon builds several hundred Group 3 aircraft for various customers a month, he noted.

Textron, the other team competing in the most recent flight demonstrations, declined to provide comment to Defense News.

Possible paths

In October last year, the Army chief of staff signed a directed requirement to get a brigade-level UAS capability out to six Transformation in Contact Brigades by the end of calendar year 2025, according to Chief Warrant Officer 5 Micah Amman, who is the requirements development lead for FTUAS within the Army’s cross-functional team for Future Vertical Lift.

“We still believe that a UAS at the Brigade level is still necessary in order to set the conditions for the rest of the Brigade,” Amman said.

To find options, the Army cast a wide net and asked industry to show them how they are filling capability needs with technology.

“We need a brigade-level capability and, I think, this is just me, we don’t know yet. We’re still trying to learn some of these things,” Amman said.

 “I think we absolutely need to be defined by formations, by [combatant commands]. So what I need at sea level might be different than what I need in the mountains, what I need in cold weather might be different than what I need in hot weather from a material standpoint,” Amman said, adding, “How do I need the system to perform, to carry those effects?

“And the effects that I need based on the scenario might be different as well, like where my [electro-optic infrared radar] might need to be different based on what the joint or multinational force is bringing to the fight, where the radios or other types of effects might be important to the brigade.”

The only document that still exists unchanged for Brigade-level UAS is the Army chief’s directed requirement, said Col. Nick Ryan, the Army capability manager for UAS within the service‘s Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate.

“We haven’t been told to relook that, to reevaluate that, to revise that. That is what is approved and that is what is out there right now and if we had funding today that is what we would go with,” he said.

But as the Improved Turbine Engine Program leaps that hurdle toward the finish line, the effort is in jeopardy as the service looks to cut large programs to make way for the pursuit of what it sees as higher priorities amid the need to cut its budget by 8% as directed by the defense secretary.

Army Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. James Mingus told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America confab here that the service is waiting to see where it lands with the fiscal 2026 budget. Officials are trying to gauge how much flexibility the service has in the budget reconciliation process to fully understand if it can afford to pay for ITEP.

“The future of ITEP is largely going to depend on where all these things land inside the ’26 budget,” Mingus said.

Currently, there is no funding planned to move the program from development into production.

Amid mixed messages on the engine’s fate over the past several weeks, following the release of an Army directive outlining sweeping change to the service dubbed by the service secretary as the Army Transformation Initiative, Army aviation leaders are working on various potential paths for the engine.

Options include outright cancellation, a continuation of the development program followed by its closeout, or a decision to proceed into production.

“We have two weeks, and now there are several programs named, you know, each of them come with a set of courses of action that we have been working on to make sure that we can meet Army senior leaders’ intent,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation, told reporters May 15 at the Army Aviation Association of America.

The ITEP program kicked off in a competition 15 years ago to replace the engines in both the UH-60 and the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. But the engine effort has been plagued by various delays across its life as the service wrestled with funding, development strategies and a protest from the Advanced Turbine Engine Company – a Honeywell and Pratt & Whitney team, which competed against General Electric’s aerospace division to build the engine for the Army.

More recently, the engine was hit with more delays due to technical issues as well as the coronavirus pandemic, which caused supply chain problems.

When GE won the contract, it touted a plan to move more quickly, but that window to accelerate closed and the Army subsequently predicted a two-year delay getting the T901 engine into the UH-60 Black Hawk, the first aircraft in the current fleet to receive the new tech.

The Army was able to garner some important data when it chose to integrate the ITEP onto two competitive prototypes for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. The companies in that competition – Bell and Sikorsky – had both received the engines and were installing them when the service decided to cancel the FARA program early last year.

When the service canceled the FARA pursuit, it also delayed a production decision for the ITEP engine by three years.

Sikorsky had taken advantage of fiscal 2024 FARA program funding before the Army officially closed the program at the end of the year to run tests of the ITEP in the prototype, ahead of integrating the engine into the UH-60, in order to drive down risk.

The company received the first ITEP engines for the Black Hawk last fall and began ground runs earlier this year.

“We’re currently still under contract to execute the program we were for ITEP,” Rich Benton, Sikorsky’s head, told Defense News in an interview at the AAAA event. “There’s still budget in 2025 to continue that work. Will there be budget in the future years or not? You know, that’s up to the Army and the [congressional] appropriators,” he said.

“The budget we have today, we’ll get the Black Hawk in the air,” he said in a May 14 interview. “How much flying and how much data we get from that will be up to the Army,” Benton said.

“We’re looking at a path ahead in real time on the options and the options could be finish [integration], because there’s not just the aircraft integration going on, but there’s also the engine qualification testing that is going on in test stands,” Phillips said. “We’ve had engines in test stands now for several years gathering low altitude, high altitude, low performance, high performance data. All of that data is very rich and informing the path ahead.”

Additionally, the Army continues to have discussions with its joint partners regarding their interest in the engine and how they might integrate it onto their aircraft and a potential path forward there, according to Phillips. And foreign partners have also asked the same question about how they could potentially move forward with the ITEP engine as well.

“We’re presenting all those, on how we could get Army senior leaders to meet their intent but get the most out of the dollars that we’ve invested in the program,” he said.

Overall, the Army has spent over an estimated $1.5 billion over the past two decades on ITEP and its precursor development. The service had spent approximately $720 million on the program by 2016. The Army’s contracts to competitors in 2016 totaled $256 million and the service awarded a $517 million contract for the engineering and manufacturing development phase to GE in 2019.

What is under consideration for a different path to modernize the Black Hawk and Apache’s engines, if the Army chooses to end the ITEP program prior to production, is unclear.

“If I had to decide today, hey, if that engine isn’t going to be available in the future, what would I do differently? Integrate a different engine? I would quickly pivot to the engine the [Special Operations forces] flies. The SOF flies with a more powerful engine,” Benton said. “Today it’s been integrated in Black Hawk, it has been demonstrated. It is available today, so there would be commonality that would provide some more capability than I have today, [but] not as much as ITEP.”

The Army is “always looking at new ways to provide more performance to the aircraft, whether it’s making components lighter, whether it’s adding more power, whether it’s adding additional fuel consumption capabilities,” Phillips said, “We always look at that and I think we’ll continue to look at that regardless of the outcome.”

In the May 7 document obtained by Defense News, the order requests an implementation plan within 30 days on how the Army will adjust to build six High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, as opposed to buying 12 of such planes.

A year ago, then-director of Army aviation Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen showed a slide during the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference in Denver, Colorado, indicating the service planned to field 14 HADES aircraft by 2035.

While the executive order appears to represent a slash to the program, “We never had a defined number in any document about how many HADES we were going to build,” Andrew Evans, Army Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force director, told reporters in a Thursday briefing at the AAAA conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We will build to the condition of the threat. We will build to the conditions of the budget,” he said. “What the Army is committed to is this mission of deep sensing. How many systems we need in the future will be a decision for the future based on the threat that we think that we’re going to face.”

While the Army is still in the early planning process for the program, any potential decision on the number of aircraft is “not going to change a single thing about the capacity or capability that we’re delivering,” Evans said.

Sierra Nevada Corporation won an Army contract to serve as the lead system integrator for the HADES program in August 2024. The award for HADES integration work covers a 12-year period worth $93.5 million initially and potentially up to $944.3 million.

HADES is the service’s effort to overhaul existing fixed-wing aircraft that perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, missions. The service has retired roughly 70 aircraft — its entire ISR fleet — recently divesting its last legacy aircraft.

And while HADES is expected to rapidly deploy and provide deep-sensing capabilities, the task force is learning the aircraft could provide even more capability than it initially imagined, including the ability to disable enemy space-based capabilities and carry launched effects.

The Army is using a large-cabin business jet, the Bombardier Global 6500, as the airframe for the spy plane. The service awarded Bombardier a contract in December for one aircraft, with an option to buy two more over a three-year period.

Buying more or less aircraft will not cause unit cost to grow or reduce because they are produced by hand by craftsmen at Sierra Nevada, Col. Joe Minor, the Army’s project manager for fixed-wing aircraft, said.

Sierra Nevada already has the first prototype aircraft delivered from Bombardier and is working in the integration piece prior to delivering the platform to the Army in September 2026, followed by a second prototype in mid-2027.

The Army has spent more than six years assessing ISR fixed-wing prototypes using high-speed jets to inform the HADES program. It began with the deployment of the Airborne Reconnaissance and Target Exploitation Multi-mission System, or Artemis, which has flown in the European theater near the Ukrainian border. Leidos built Artemis using a Bombardier Challenger 650 jet.

The service then deployed its Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System, or ARES, to the Pacific region in April 2022. L3Harris built the aircraft using a Bombardier Global Express 6500 jet.

The Army is also building four more prototypes that will inform the requirements for the HADES program. The service chose Sierra Nevada and a MAG Aerospace and L3Harris team to deliver two jets each with spy technologies to advance long-range targeting plans.

MAG and L3’s prototypes use a Global 6500 with ISR sensors for the Army’s radar-focused Athena-R effort, while Sierra Nevada is providing RAPCON-X for the service’s signals intelligence-focused Athena-S project. RAPCON-X is also the basis for HADES.

When the first HADES prototype is ready, the Army will deploy HADES for a limited period of time and then start building more aircraft as the early prototype remains deployed.

Tim Owings, executive vice president for Sierra Nevada’s Mission Solutions and Technologies business area, likened it to “sudden-death playoffs.”

“We have to deliver prototype one. We deliver prototype one, and it delivers the value that we think this platform is going to provide. We think it becomes a no-brainer decision to add more quantities down the line,” Owings said.

“This is like a newlywed couple arguing whether they wanted to have a fourth child when they haven’t had a first child, or a second child or a third child yet,” he said. “Those are decisions that are down the road. They’re reserved for our senior leaders, and we’re working closely with industry partners to be able to manage that, but to freak out about what’s going to happen in the future, it’s probably a little bit unnecessary.”

The service recently released a market survey looking for what it’s calling Purpose-Built, Attritable Systems, or PBAS, and is headed into an Army Requirements Oversight Council review of the requirements sometime in June, Col. Danielle Medaglia said Wednesday at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference.

The PM UAS within Program Executive Office Aviation is working with the Maneuver Center of Excellence to develop the requirements for PBAS, she noted.

While the initial focus for the program was the massively popular first-person view drones that were made battlefield famous in the war in Ukraine, the Army sees these attritable drones possessing a much wider range of capabilities and control mechanisms. They will be “a multifunctional capability,” said Col. Nick Ryan, the Army capability manager for UAS within the service‘s Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate.

“It can be FPV, it can be first-person view control, like wiggling the sticks like you see in Ukraine, or it could be more of like what the [Short-Range Reconnaissance] is where you just kind of control it a little easier, push a couple buttons, give it a couple waypoints and it goes off and flies by itself.”

The drones could also be tethered using something like fiber-optic cable, Ryan added, or they could be autonomous and a flight plan and mission preprogrammed.

“You have your target and I’m not going to talk to you anymore, go,” he said.

The Army also envisions the drones taking swarming formations and pairing with manned helicopters like the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, Ryan noted.

Another option would be to use the drones for countering enemy drones.

“PBAS is the perfect thing that could that as an air-to-air autonomous dog fight. Just tell it, launch it and say, ‘Hey, go kill things in the air. Robot to robot,” Ryan said.

The call-to-industry for solutions published roughly two weeks ago generated over 60 responses from vendors.

The evaluation board for those proposals will begin its work this week, Medaglia said. The effort is funded from evaluating paper proposals to inviting select vendors to flight demonstrations.

The Army plans to award multiple vendors following those flight demonstrations, according to Medaglia. The service will look to companies who have the ability to quickly produce the systems.

“We need to scale,” she said. “We want to get it out quickly, learn, iterate. We are moving incredibly, incredibly quickly in this space. It’s funded. We have responses, and we‘re ready to roll.”

“We may have to have standoff capability that we’ve not yet envisioned today,” Andrew Evans said Wednesday at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference.

The Army is already focused on developing launched effects from both ground and air platforms for short, medium and long-range distances.

“What we’re going to do in the intel space is demonstrate what we call ultra-long-range launched effects,” Evans said.

“What we’re looking at doing is something that represents a thousand miles past the prime mover, so imagine a system that can deliver a launched effect that can get itself into a position of launch and then a thousand miles beyond that, which is over-the-horizon sensing. You’re getting into some game-changing capabilities.”

The ISR Task Force plans to conduct a user demonstration in 2026 exploring what this concept could look like using a commercial aircraft to then deploy a long-range launched effect.

“We believe industry has solved a lot of these problems already. What we have done is get all the right industry partners together to try to figure out how to build the ecosystem around that,” he said.

The Army’s approach will likely first focus on the “glide body itself, the propulsion vehicle,” Evans said, then the service will layer in sensing capabilities. Lastly, it will focus on “backhauling” or transporting the data off of the platform to the relevant command and control interfaces.

“The sensing and the backhaul are not trivial,” said Lawrence Mixon, special assistant to the Program Executive Officer for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

“Our integrated sensor architecture folks within the PEO have already been working in that regard with standards from data that should help in partnering with industry to get through that backhaul piece,” he said, adding, “it also ties back into next-generation command-and-control and standards there to enable that information to get to decision makers, to commanders.”

Earlier this year, the Army issued a call to industry looking for unmanned aircraft systems to launch from medium- or high-altitude platforms that would perform tasks like ISR, according to the notice posted to the federal business opportunities portal Sam.gov.

A demonstration of operational capability is planned for the fiscal 2026 timeframe. This effort will also help inform the work in which the ISR Task Force is engaged.

While the task force’s demonstration would not use the Army’s emerging high-speed spy jet called HADES, which is short for “High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System,” one concept for an ultra-long-range effect uses the long legs of that platform to deeply penetrate over enemy territory, followed by an even deeper journey using the launched effect.

HADES is currently in the prototyping phase.

“We’re in a situation where we may not even be able to move out of a port of the United States without some sort of threat to our force projection,” Evans said.

“As intel professionals, we ha[ve] to figure out a way to overcome that because sensing has to lead that capability, to answer those questions you [have] to know where you’re about to project those forces and what kind of fight they’re about to get into,” Evans said.

“And something like HADES or the other work that we’re doing in [Multidomain Sensing Systems] allows us to self-project, which is why ultra-long-range effects, that becomes also important.”

The Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of air traffic controllers, Frank McIntosh, confirmed the agency didn’t even know the hotline hadn’t been working since March 2022 until after the latest near miss. He said civilian controllers still have other means of communicating with their military counterparts through landlines. Still, the FAA insists the hotline be fixed before helicopter flights resume around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Defense department officials didn’t immediately respond to questions Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month and the steps it is taking to ensure helicopter flights in the area are safe. The FAA didn’t immediately answer follow-up questions after the hearing about how that hotline was supposed to be used.

“The developments at DCA [Reagan Airport] in its airspace are extremely concerning,” Cruz said. “This committee remains laser-focused on monitoring a safe return to operations at DCA and making sure all users in the airspace are operating responsibly.”

The Army suspended all helicopter flights around Reagan airport after the latest near miss, but McIntosh said the FAA was close to ordering the Army to stop flying because of the safety concerns before it did so voluntarily.

“We did have discussions if that was an option that we wanted to pursue,” McIntosh told the Senate Commerce Committee at the hearing.

January’s crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people — making it the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil since 2001. The National Transportation Safety Board has said there were an alarming 85 near misses around Reagan in the three years before the crash that should have prompted action.

Since the crash, the FAA has tried to ensure that military helicopters never share the same airspace as planes, but controllers had to order two planes to abort their landings on May 1 because of an Army helicopter circling near the Pentagon.

“After the deadly crash near Reagan National Airport, FAA closed the helicopter route involved, but a lack of coordination between FAA and the Department of Defense has continued to put the flying public at risk,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth said.

McIntosh said the helicopter should never have entered the airspace around Reagan Airport without permission from an air traffic controller.

“That did not occur,” he said. “My question — and I think the larger question is — is why did that not occur? Without compliance to our procedures and our policies, this is where safety drift starts to happen.”

The NTSB is investigating what happened.

In addition to that incident, a commercial flight taking off from Reagan airport had to take evasive action after coming within a few hundred feet of four military jets heading to a flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. McIntosh blamed that incident on a miscommunication between FAA air traffic controllers at a regional facility and the tower at Reagan, which he said had been addressed.