Interview transcript: 

Jared Serbu Don’t need to dig into all of the details that went into the source selection here, but if you could give me, just give our listeners a minute or two on this new platform and what makes it such a step forward from the platforms it’s replacing, that would that would help us out greatly for the rest of the conversation.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, and I could go ahead and give an industry perspective on that. And this is Ryan. So really back in the 2012, 2013 timeframe, we were looking to differentiate capability for the warfighter in terms of vertical lift capability by going twice as fast and twice as far. And a lot of that was under the future vertical lift program effort. And so we started with a demonstrator concept called the V-280 Valor. That really captured a lot of lessons learned from previous tilt rotor experience that Bell had, and it really leveraged that to fly a demonstrator in 2017, accumulate about 215 flight hours on it, and I think inform the Army on tilt rotor technology and requirements that could be met by that technology to support their eventual solicitation and down select of a tilt rotor for supporting the future long-range assault aircraft program.

Jared Serbu Great. Anything to add on that, Colonel?

Col. Jeffrey Poquette Yeah, it’s very similar in that the Army was looking for something that provided transformational speed and range over the current Black Hawk fleet. And then additionally, the government really wanted the aircraft to be an open system. So the ability to upgrade the aircraft in the future quickly, cheaply, without necessarily having to go to any one particular vendor. So the open system is another key part of the platform.

Jared Serbu Got it. And so at this point looking forward, the ask from the Secretary, as I understand it, is to get a prototype up and running by next fiscal year, which is pretty ambitious. So talk us through a bit some of the key things that you’re going to be doing to meet that schedule.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, we’ve been laser focused on acceleration and getting a prototype out there next year. And so a lot of the work that we’ve been doing is taking the success that we had on the V-280 demonstrator, applying a lot of the items from that in terms of configuration and critical technologies, applying that to a design meeting the requirements for the future long range assault aircraft. And so what we’ve been working on with the government team is first and foremost establishing a foundation of an all digital design, incorporating using model-based systems engineering, but incorporating, as Jeff mentioned, the modular open systems approach. So a lot of the design work that we’ve been doing with the government to date has resulted in more than 90% of our engineering being released and a significant amount of work going on across the industrial base related to building hardware to support that first, and not just the first prototype, but the first six or eight prototypes that will be coming out of the program. But we’d look to complete that in early FY 27, that first prototype.

Jared Serbu Colonel, from the government side, what sorts of risks does that aggressive schedule potentially introduce for you, and what are some of the things that you’re looking to do to manage that?

Col. Jeffrey Poquette Yeah, I think initially when we were asked to accelerate, our concern was, okay, if we start working now while we’re still in the middle of the design process, the chance is always there that we could end up building a prototype that doesn’t do what we need it to do. The reason why we’re okay with that and are willing to accept some of that risk is exactly for the reasons that Ryan mentioned. The V-280 demonstrator gives us a lot of confidence in tilt rotor technology. We know Bell knows how to do it. The open system is something that they’re fully on board with. And then the digital engineering and the digital environment provides the government a lot of insight into the design itself as it’s occurring. Other things that we’ve agreed to do was allowed Bell to pursue some commercial best practices when it comes to safety of flight on some of the early prototypes and being able to leverage FAA certifications instead of Army airworthiness certifications, while in the background we’ll continue to work Army airworthiness. So that is a little bit of an elevated risk, but one that the Army was willing to accept. Some of the digital engineering and technical deliverables, we’ve deferred the actual delivery of the items. However, what we’ve decided to do is really work together as an integrated team. So my team of a hundred or so engineers very often are down there out in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, working side by side along Bell engineers. So we have the insight of working along the way. Bell has the ability to ask questions and make adjustments and they get feedback very quickly, as opposed to maybe earlier it was about handing over technical deliverables for very thorough reviews. So we’ve kind of accelerated our review process, other things. The supply chain is always a concern and the Secretary asked us to leverage the Defense Production Act. So we are engaged with the Army and soon to be the Department of War on how we can potentially get some elevated priority on our program when it comes to the Defense Production Act.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, and I do think that approach is working well, and I do appreciate when people ask us the question about risk associated with acceleration because it gives us a chance to kind of walk through why I think we’re in a uniquely favorable position to accelerate. And part of it we talked about was the demonstrator and going 215 flight hours and all the data we were able to capture from that successful effort, but then also looking at the steps that we go through from early digital engineering and digital design where we have fly-throughs leveraging virtual reality and augmented reality. We bring the maintainers into that virtual environment and have them simulate maintenance of the aircraft very, very early in the design phase so that we don’t have discoveries, three, five, ten years later as we’re trying to sustain the platform. A lot of that gets baked in early. And then from the standpoint of getting to first flight and flight test activity, we spend a lot of time trying to get discoveries as early as possible in the process. And how we do that is by doing a lot of component-based testing, whether it’s fatigue testing, vibration testing, things of that nature at the component level. And then we integrate all of those components, aside from the structure, but all the systems, a pilot in the loop, all the software in a weapon systems integration lab. And we have that facility down in Arlington, Texas, and the pilot will fly a fully integrated set of systems on the ground for months and months and months, proving out the software and proving out the integration of these components before we ever step foot in an aircraft. So we get a lot of opportunity to reduce risk and learn these lessons early in the program before we’ve started making even some of those accelerated LRIP aircraft.

Jared Serbu Digital engineering’s come up a few times in the conversation so far, and I’m wondering if either or both of you want to give some concrete examples of some of the work that you’ve been able to do in that virtual world and save time that way versus things that, in a previous era, would have had to be done purely in a physical world.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, just to give a couple examples and then I’ll pass it to to Jeff. But I mentioned the maintainers, and being able to have maintainers, in some cases it’s veterans that we’ve brought over from the services into Bell that have done this for their first career and now they’re spending their second career, so to speak, making sure we get it right. But they actually have virtual, I’ll say tools and toolboxes, and they work to maintain that aircraft. And they’ll come to the engineering team after a test run and say, look, I had to remove three things to get to the part I was trying to fix, and it gives us an opportunity to fix that and make sure that number one, keep things from failing, but if something does fail, let’s make sure it fails in a benign way and in a way that we can replace it and repair it in the field and as easily as possible. And the digital engineering, and I think Jeff will probably touch on this, it is an investment. And it’s an investment early on that allows you to also take all these digital artifacts as kind of one source of truth and use them to support your tech pubs and your manuals, and again that sustainment and logistics tail that the aircraft will have for decades to come. But it all goes back to that initial investment in digital engineering and that single source of truth. And I’ll pass it to Jeff.

Col. Jeffrey Poquette Yeah, we’re really proud of the fact that this program was born digital. So we are clearly leading the way for defense acquisitions. We’re a digital engineering pathfinder for the department. Like Ryan said, I think there’s perhaps a misnomer out there that the investment in digital engineering somehow means that you get to go fast while you’re designing. And I always say, look, this is an investment in time. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are designing faster. What it means is when we complete the design and then build it, you can actually test faster because there’s a lot more that’s right with the aircraft. You’re a lot closer to what you wanted to get. The model-based systems engineering approach has allowed us and allowed Bell to really come up with a design that we’re very confident won’t miss any of the key requirements. In the past, it would be hard to know whether you were going to miss satisfying a requirement until you got to test. And then if it happened to be a big expensive miss during test, then you’re now iterating in the test environment. The goal was to really iterate in this digital and MDSE environment such that when you build the prototypes, you can have a test program that’s half as long as a traditional aircraft test program that has occurred in the past. So that’s really what we’re getting at. MDSE and digital engineering go hand in hand. My engineers can go right to their computer and workstations and look at the design in real time. And that has never been able to be done before when you do things the old way.

Jared Serbu On that requirements piece, I’d love to hear you both talk through a bit about the extent to which, if at all, requirements have needed to be changed in order to meet that go faster directive. And if the answer’s no, tell us a bit about why not.

Col. Jeffrey Poquette I’ll take that one. Look, this aircraft is made up of hundreds and hundreds of requirements and they’re tiered into different buckets. None of the most important requirements to include things that are deeply important to the Army, like MOSA, have had to be trade off. Might we have to trade some weight, take on a little bit of extra weight to include some provisions to ensure that the aircraft is truly modular and can handle the SOCOM variant and handle the medevac requirement? Might we have had to make those kinds of decisions? Absolutely. Are there certain things in the requirements document that are deep down in the in the requirement that might not be on the first aircraft? Probably. But that’s not what we’re seeking. We’re not seeking perfection. The Secretary and the Chief made it very clear. We’re not trying to get it absolutely perfect. What we need to do is deliver transformational capability. That’s what we mean when we talk about the speed and range twice as far, twice as fast, and the ability to handle the MOSA architecture and the open system. If we get that, we’re going to have a very, very good first iteration of the aircraft. And by the same token, the open systems architecture will allow us to go in and upgrade anything that needs upgrading. When you go faster, you might have to trade off requirements. We haven’t had any big decision event like that yet, but it is certainly something that we might have to think about in the future.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, and I would echo that. I think we’re very proud of where we’re looking relative to the requirements for the platform and the capability it will provide the warfighter. And I’ll just go back to the, I’ll say, head start we had relative to tilt rotor technology being being mature and giving us a good foundation to start with.

Jared Serbu Last thing here, and I don’t want to look too far down the road, but now’s the time to start thinking about these things obviously, and obviously you have been already thinking about sustainment, but specifically, what do things like that open systems architecture, having that engineering data, having all of that digital engineering data in hand, do for you, down the road when you get to a sustainment phase on a platform like this?

Col. Jeffrey Poquette I’ll take this one initially. So sustainment is one of the things we’ve been thinking about very early on in the program. When we went to our development decision, Milestone B, I would say nearly half of the very extensive and rigorous documentation we had to submit to the Army and the Department of War was focused on the lifecycle sustainment plan. So it’s very much a key element of the program. I would say one quarter of my office are logisticians that focus on things like training, on maintenance and that kind of thing. Ryan mentioned the digital environment, being able to look at the design through virtual means with virtual headsets or augmented reality, that kind of thing. That has given us the ability to provide feedback so we get it right the first time. And then having access to certain data rights allows the Army to write training so that the training meets the Army’s standards. It allows us to make decisions on what components we want to overhaul in the depot out there in Corpus Christi. Most importantly, I would say, is maintenance and ensuring that we have a good understanding about when parts will need to be replaced. I think all the work that Bell has done has allowed us to have a lot more insight into when components would need to be overhauled and replaced. Digital twins will be developed. So every tail number in the Army out there will have its own digital twin that will reside and can be accessed by my office so that if there is a problem in the field, my logisticians and former maintainers will be able to look at that digital twin and have a really good snapshot of what’s going on with the aircraft. And like Ryan said, it all comes down to having a single source of truth. In the past, documents would get shoveled over email, and eventually, inevitably, someone would end up with an out-of-date or not the current version of what you’re supposed to be looking at. This eliminates a lot of that churn, and I really see the sustainment of this aircraft is going to be a big part of why we call this aircraft affordable. As you know, sustainment, for the lifecycle of a program, we consider about 70% of the cost of the lifecycle of the program to be due to the sustainment phase. So it’s very important to us that we reduce those sustainment costs. And kind of final point here, you typically can estimate the sustainment burden of an aircraft based on its weight. And while the MV-75 isn’t especially light, it’s on the heavier side when you compare it to heavier lift aircraft like Chinook. We have a much, we’ve predicted through simulations and modeling that the sustainment is going to be much, much less than aircraft of its size and weight.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And I would just say from an industry standpoint, programmatically and I’ll even say culturally, we’ve approached this clean sheet development in a different way that I think provides a lot more tools for the user, for the Army to maintain this long term. And some of the things that Jeff mentioned related to the correlation between weight and maintenance cost or weight and cost in general. I’d like to think we’re breaking some of those cost curves with this because of a lot of the tools that we’ve used, and quite frankly because of some of the newer technologies that are available today that weren’t available when some of the currently fielded aircraft were developed.

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