The Future Vertical Lift Initiative – What Right Looks Like

The Future Vertical Lift initiative is a bright spot in major defense platform acquisition. The story of how the FVL vision has come to fruition still holds important lessons even today. 

JAST evolved into the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, and TACAIR was on a path to its 5th Generation.

The progress of TACAIR contrasted starkly with the state of America’s rotorcraft platforms, which were still languishing in the post-Vietnam era, with no innovative vertical lift programs on the acquisition horizon other than the V-22 Osprey.

Then, in 1998, under the direction of the leadership in the Joint Staff J-8, the Land and Littoral Warfare Assessment Division was tasked to look at developing a model similar to JAST that would describe a future vertical lift force. This effort eventually recommended a “neck down” of all vertical lift aircraft types into three primary lines of effort - small, medium and large. The end product of this rudimentary analysis was ultimately briefed to the Joint Requirements Oversight Counsel (JROC). 

The FVL initiative then languished as the U.S. military focused on fighting the Global War on Terror over the next decade. Extremely high operational tempo, challenging combat operations in harsh desert operating environments, and the incessant need to adapt and upgrade legacy rotorcraft made it clear that vertical lift improvements were required.

Finally, Members of Congress appealed to the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff to act. In January 2008, they requested “a Capabilities Based Assessment (CBA) outlining a joint approach to the future development of vertical lift aircraft for all of the military services.” The Secretary of Defense quickly responded to Congress by tasking the Joint Advanced Concepts Directorate, Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (OUSD (AT&L)) to lead the development of a CBA.

As a result of that effort, “The Future Vertical Lift Initiative – A Construct for the Future” was codified in October 2008. With that, the promise of advancing vertical lift into the future was born. 

Fulfilling that promise would require the services to solve certain challenges. A primary challenge was how to develop a set of common requirements designed to take advantage of evolving technology. 

By exploiting open architectures, the services would be able to build affordable and easily upgradeable aircraft with low-cost differentiation among service variants.

Initial requirements envisioned light, medium, and heavy classes of rotorcraft, binned into various capability sets. Ultimately, the decision was made to begin FVL investment in the medium class (ultimately known as Capability Set 3) to replace UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1Y Venom (and perhaps also AH-64 Apache and AH-1Z Viper) helicopters. The U.S. Army was designated lead service with multi-service participation.

The Army embarked on building two Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrators (JMRTD’S) with their chosen industry partners. The objective was to achieve highly efficient and affordable technical maturation by leveraging heavy industry participation using Independent Research and Development (IR&D) funds.

Using an emerging agile acquisition process authorized by the Congress, the JMRTD aircraft informed achievable and affordable Army requirements. Two teams, one led by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and another led by Bell, each built highly innovative flying demonstrators.

After thorough review and scrutiny of the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, the Army selected the Bell V-280 Valor technical demonstrator to serve as the baseline for their next major aviation acquisition program. 

This highly capable advanced tiltrotor aircraft promises the range, speed, endurance, and survivability the military will need on the future battlefield. Called the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), the service plans to take advantage of the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) and Digital Engineering Ecosystem (DEE) to ensure affordable upgrades and minimize the impact of obsolescence issues going forward.

The key benefits of the FVL initiative are twofold:  (1) Once a service decides to pursue an FVL capability set, the time from concept development to weapons delivery is significantly reduced; and (2) because both the open architecture of MOSA and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) are baked into FVL, the procuring service can seamlessly upgrade their onboard systems throughout the aircraft’s entire life cycle. This is essential if we are going to take advantage of new technology that evolves year after year.

The FVL vision is becoming reality as we speak. The FLRAA program achieved Milestone B in August 2024. This enabled the program to enter the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase, where several prototypes will be built over the next two years leading to the first unit equipped in 2031 or earlier.

What was once a technical demonstrator is transforming into a warfighting machine with a truly open approach to the architecture across the entire aircraft, and the Army is aggressively assessing how this capability will revolutionize their operating concepts. This process is also leveraging two decades of lessons learned by other tiltrotor operators.

The success thus far of Army FLRAA validates the FVL concept, but it is only the beginning. Other US services and international partners are actively pursuing variants of FLRAA to minimize non-recurring engineering costs and keep modifications to a bare minimum, all the while benefitting from world-class vertical lift technology needed to meet pressing warfighting requirements.

And, beyond the medium lift platforms that Capability Set 3 will produce, there is a range of four other capability sets that will benefit from the FLRAA experience.

The vision born in 1998 is being realized. Congress and the American people are real-time witnesses to efficiency and creativity in defense acquisition. Future Vertical Lift is what right looks like, and it should serve as a model for major platform development and acquisition going forward.

Lieutenant General Conant’s last active duty billet was serving as the Deputy Commander, United States Pacific Command. Throughout the course of his Marine Corps career, he commanded aviation units at every level while also serving multiple staff tours with the Joint Staff J-8 and Headquarters, U. S. Marine Corps.