A mockup of Bell’s V-280 Valor at the Paris Air Show.
LE BOURGET—With the award for the U.S. Army’s massive Future Long-Range Attack Aircraft (FLRAA) in hand, Bell is reviewing its production capacity and planning investments to meet the program’s large requirements with a potential opening for international customers.
The Army in December awarded Bell the FLRAA engineering and manufacturing development contract to create a digital prototype of its V-280 Valor, which eventually will replace much of the service’s Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk fleet. It could be worth up to $70 billion for the life of the program, to include foreign military sales.
Lisa Atherton, who took over as Bell’s CEO in April, says the company’s focus now is on executing the contract, for which Bell spent over a decade preparing.
“The only way to make sure that [Bell’s] future is secure is to hit every single mark on this contract as needed for the Army,” she tells reporters at the Paris Air Show here in Le Bourget.
With the initial contract awarded, Bell is ramping up its hiring to prepare for production. The company’s physical capacity is enough to build the initial few aircraft needed by the end of the decade, but Bell will likely need to scale its facilities beyond the existing line size in Amarillo, Texas, where it also builds the V-22 Osprey and H-1 variants.
“We are going to have to make some investments and put some money into this to be ready to go, and we don’t want to wait,” Atherton says.
Exactly how much the company needs to expand hasn’t been determined, as the company awaits more details from the Army on production ramp-up targets. Bell does not yet know where it will need to go for year-over-year production.
Additionally, Bell is ensuring its subcontractors on the program will be able expand their capacity to meet the targets when they are determined.
The Army is planning a production readiness review in 2027 to oversee Bell’s plans to meet its goals. “That’s a mere three years away. So we’re investing now to make sure we can hit that rate,” Atherton says.
Bell in 2020 cut the ribbon on a new Manufacturing Technology Center, where it is conducting research and development on new production technologies and techniques that could be used for the V-280. The goal is for Bell to move faster in producing the V-280 than it did for the V-22.
Keith Flail, executive vice president of Bell’s military business, says these techniques will focus on key features of the V-280, such as the transmission, gearboxes, blades and advanced composites. The facility is a “microcosm” of Bell’s goal for V-280 production broadly, he says.
The production target rate is daunting, with Sikorsky’s UH-60 line at one point delivering 80 aircraft per year.
“So we have to get that nailed down—we will with our customers. We look at that scalability piece of what we need to do,” he says.
At the same time, Bell is looking at other potential openings for the V-280. This includes offering it for the U.S. Navy’s Future Vertical Lift Maritime Strike and to the U.S. Marine Corps as part of its future vertical-takeoff-and-landing family of systems.
Army production will be the top priority, but the company wants to scale production to the point where there could be room for further growth in the mid-2030s. This would allow for more production slots to coincide with NATO’s Next Generation Rotorcraft Capability for France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK.
