For the first time, Sikorsky’s optionally-piloted UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter performed parachute drops, hovered on its own while sling loads were attached, and flew a simulated medical evacuation mission at the direction of an untrained individual onboard. This all took place at an exercise earlier this year, which also marked the first instance in which a member of the U.S. military had full control over the Optionally Piloted Vehicle (OPV) Black Hawk. Sikorsky has been steadily expanding the OPV’s flight envelope and capabilities for years now, work that is now also feeding into its plan for its fully uncrewed U-Hawk drone.
Sikorsky, currently a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, brought the OPV Black Hawk to Exercise Northern Strike 25-2 back in August, but details about how the helicopter was utilized are only being shared now. The OPV’s participation in the event came through a partnership with the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Each year, the Michigan National Guard’s National All-Domain Warfighting Center (NADWC) hosts multiple iterations of Northern Strike, which features air, as well as ground and maritime components.
Flight testing of the OPV Black Hawk first started in 2019, and it flew for the first time without anyone on board three years later. At the core of the OPV is a fly-by-wire control system coupled with the MATRIX autonomy flight control software package. Development of MATRIX stretches back more than a decade now, and DARPA supported it early on through the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program.
At present, the semi-autonomous OPV is capable of flying along preset routes, which can be planned in advance of a sortie or on the fly in the field, all via a touch-screen interface on a tablet-like device. The helicopter has a degree of automated obstacle avoidance capability, and routes can also be manually altered by an operator while it is in flight. The pilot-optional Black Hawk does not require constant contact with a human operator to perform a mission, and it can act on instructions from multiple individuals at different points in a sortie. In addition, the control system allows for the performance of certain specific tasks, such as ordering the helicopter to go to a point and hold a hover there at a designated altitude. Just starting up and shutting down the OPV is done at the touch of a button, as well.
“Events like Northern Strike give us the opportunity to take user feedback and roll that into [MATRIX] software improvements as part of a continuous spiral of software loads,” Mike Baran, chief engineer at Sikorsky Innovations, told TWZ in an interview ahead of today’s announcements. “So over the past year, it’s [continued work on the OPV] been largely in the software area, and it enabled a lot of these missions that we performed successfully out at Northern Strike.”
It is important to note the OPV flew all of its sorties at Northern Strike 25-2 with a safety pilot on board. This is something that was dictated by the parameters of the exercise, which occurred within domestic U.S. airspace managed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). There are strict regulations around where and when fully uncrewed aircraft can fly within the United States. In general, having a human pilot onboard also provides an additional margin of safety.
At Northern Strike 25-2, “a U.S. Army National Guard Sergeant First Class, trained in less than an hour, became the first soldier to independently plan, command, and execute OPV Black Hawk missions using the system’s handheld tablet,” according to a press release from Lockheed Martin today. “He directed the payload to a location 70 nautical miles away and commanded multiple precision airborne drops, marking the first time OPV Black Hawk operated fully under the control of an actual warfighter, instead of a trained test pilot or engineer.”
The Sergeant First Class in question, who has not been named, was also notably not a military aviator, which Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky say underscores the ease of training individuals to operate the OPV.
“The level of autonomy that the team has with the MATRIX technology and how that’s put into the [OPV] aircraft, it really takes an operator, not a pilot,” Ramsey Bentley, Sikorsky Advanced Programs Business Development Director, also told TWZ while speaking alongside chief engineer Baran.
For the precision parachute drops during Northern Strike 25-2, the OPV had first been directed to fly racetrack patterns over Lake Huron. Soldiers on board were responsible for actually releasing the payloads from the helicopter. Lockheed Martin’s press release also notes that this particular sortie was planned and executed while the operator was aboard a U.S. Coast Guard boat on the lake.
In addition, the “OPV Black Hawk completed its first-ever autonomous hookup of an external load while airborne,” according to the release. “Using its hover stability capabilities, the aircraft held position while soldiers quickly and efficiently attached a 2,900-pound water tank [trailer; also known colloquially as a water buffalo] without pilot intervention. The demonstration showed that a MATRIX-equipped aircraft can perform complex aerial resupply missions in the field.”
The OPV also carried Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) Family of Munitions (MFOM) ammunition ‘pods’ slung underneath multiple times during the exercise. Tracked M270 MLRS and the wheeled M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launch vehicles both fire various munitions via standardized MFOM pods.
Sling load operations, including hooking and unhooking payloads, as well as flying to a destination with a large object swinging below, can be complex and challenging.
“The amount of experience that a pilot has, especially doing sling load operations and hookups – it takes really years to develop that capability, and that additional sense, or that ‘air sense,’ if you would,” Bentley said. “It’s not very easy, hovering over a point that you can’t see underneath to do these hookups and things like that.”
“One of the things that we’ve heard from operators on the ground is that the MATRIX capability and the autonomy [on the OPV] actually provides a much more stable platform than with a human pilot on board,” he added. “When you bring the aircraft in through the tablet interface and you ask it to hold a 10-foot hover, it holds a 10-foot hover.”
“You’re not relying on a crew chief that’s frankly hanging out of a window or hanging out the back of the aircraft, kind of upside down,” to help keep the helicopter in the proper position, he further noted. With the OPV, “the operator himself kind of has that third-person viewpoint.”
Lastly, at Northern Strike 25-2, “a soldier then used OPV Black Hawk to conduct a simulated personnel recovery, including a tail-to-tail patient transfer to a piloted Black Hawk at an unimproved landing site,” according to Lockheed Martin’s release. “This was the first time an untrained soldier commanded an autonomous MEDEVAC [medical evacuation] recovery from inside the OPV Black Hawk aircraft.”
All of this underscores the potential benefits and flexibility that optionally piloted Black Hawks might offer, especially due to the reduced crewing requirements. Being able to perform missions, or just pre-position helicopters, without the need for a pilot would be a boon in many scenarios, while also helping to reduce physical and mental strain on aviators, particularly during high-tempo operations. DARPA’s aforementioned ALIAS program was focused heavily just on increasing safety margins by scaling back the workload for human pilots, as you can read more about here. Not needing to have any humans on board for certain missions would help reduce risk, which could open up new operational opportunities in or around more contested environments, as well.
In speaking with TWZ, Sikorsky’s Bentley offered a more complete vignette for how OPVs might be utilized in future operations.
“Think about contested logistics, where, at the load point, you’ve got soldiers on the ground … The aircraft runs through all the preflight checks and everything, just like a human pilot would,” he explained. So, with “the ability of the aircraft to be sitting there at a field site, a non-pilot operator walks up, cranks the aircraft, loads in his mission, the aircraft picks up, it hovers over, or it does its internal load operations, and then it takes off and departs along on the mission [route], avoiding obstacles, etc.”
“Then, once the aircraft gets to the destination, another operator can take command of the aircraft, and execute the load out or the drop of the load,” he continued. “Or the aircraft will land and the operator can shut it down, or whatever they need to do.”
“You know the key thing there is that that’s really a customer decision,” Bentley also said when asked specifically about whether there might be plans to demonstrate the ability of OPV to conduct air drops with personnel in the main cabin, but no one in the cockpit. “Obviously, we are very comfortable with the autonomy capability of the aircraft, … but when it comes to employment of the capability and technology, that’s really a customer decision on how they want to employ the asset.”
He added that the OPV’s capabilities, and that of the underlying MATRIX software, are expanding and evolving with a constant eye toward being scalable to meet individual customer demands, which will be based in part on “their permissions, their authorizations,” and what they learn as they “develop their individual techniques, tactics, and procedures.”
Work on the OPV is also now feeding into a larger vision of crewed, pilot-option, and/or fully uncrewed variations of the Black Hawk operating collaboratively together. Bentley noted that Sikorsky has previously envisioned OPVs flying out ahead of crewed Black Hawks with soldiers onboard to perform various tasks as part of a larger mission.
“Now you’ve got [fully uncrewed] U-Hawks out there in front, and that U-Hawk is delivering launched effects UASs [uncrewed aerial systems] ahead of the ground force, and then that U-Hawk lands in the landing zone and dispatches UGVs, uncrewed ground vehicles, ahead of the soldiers,” he said. “And now we’re doing that autonomy, uncrewed, both air and ground teaming, in the soldiers’ hands, setting the conditions before the soldiers ever arrive at the landing zone.”
Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin are also heavily pitching U-Hawk as a way to squeeze new capability out of older UH-60L model Black Hawks, which the U.S. Army is notably in the process of retiring. Converting L variants in U-Hawks has been presented as a relatively economical option that is able to leverage well-established global sustainment chains, as well.
“We think about the Black Hawk as an enduring platform. The Army’s said that it’s going to be around for another 50-plus years,” Bentley said when asked about any potential plans now for offering an OPV-type conversion option. “So our ability to take MATRIX technology and put that on enduring platforms is critical to developing new capability, and, frankly, doing it at a different price point.”
The exact difference in the price point between the U-Hawk and OPV configurations is unclear, but Sikorsky has noted in the past that the OPV has additional systems requirements because it is still rated for crewed flight. There are then distinct costs associated with meeting those demands.
Non-military customers for OPV Black Hawks, as well as U-Hawks, could also be in the wings. The current operator base for crewed Black Hawks already extends beyond armed forces. Sikorsky has already demonstrated the OPV’s ability to conduct a wildfire-fighting mission, which also involved working with a third party to develop unique additions to the MATRIX software for that role.
“So we were out in California in April of this year, working with a company called Rain. And Rain went in and developed a kind of a wildfire suppression algorithm and autonomy capability, where it uses the sensors on board OPV Hawk to spot the wildfire,” Bentley said. “And we were able to demonstrate autonomous wildfire suppression to include OPV going [and] finding the pool or the fill site for the Bambi Bucket.”
“And then once it filled up the Bambi Bucket with water, then the system [on] the aircraft would take off, and it would go toward a general area that the team designated as an area of interest,” he continued. “The sensors on board the aircraft … then would identify the fire through a FLIR [forward-looking infrared] camera. And then the Rain autonomy [package] would figure out the hot spot, figure out the approach path, and the dispersion of the water, and then it would command the OPV aircraft to fly the flight route. And then it commanded the water release also.”
Altogether, as the details about what happened at Northern Strike 25-2 have now further underscored, Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin continue to steadily build out the OPV Black Hawk’s capabilities, which could also now have implications for U-Hawk.
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