The Army Wants a New Armed Scout Helicopter
Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft will be the flying cavalry of the 21st century.
The U.S. Army seeks a new armed reconnaissance helicopter that will range across the battlefield, acting as the eyes and ears of commanders on the ground. Planned for an introduction in the 2020s, the Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) would give the Army back a capability it lost when the service put its scout helicopters out to pasture.
In the mid 2010s, the U.S. Army retired its fleet OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters. The two person OH-58D acted as an aeroscout, locating and identifying enemy forces for its bigger siblings, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, to sweep in and destroy. The OH-58Ds were removed from the Army inventory, through some of them still serve on in the Croatian Air Force.
OH-58D Kiowa Warrior.
U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Ken Scar
Now the Army wants a new scout aircraft. According to Breaking Defense FARA most likely would serve in new squadron-sized units, meaning a group of 24 to 30 aircraft. These new air cavalry squadrons would provide Army corps commanders with their own recon capability, ranging out and locating threats before they close with friendly troops on the ground. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, and knowing the locations of enemy forces will help ground commanders make critical decisions about their own forces.
According to Breaking Defense, could spread to the various existing helicopter units across the U.S. Army. But what will FARA look like? Breaking Defense previously identified three things the Army wants: speed (180 to 205 knots), small size (to fly down city streets), and optionally manned (a crew of two, one, or none). FARA would probably be lightly armed, with a pair of Hellfire anti-tank missiles and a machine gun or rockets on outboard pylons. The Army seems to have backed off the requirement that a scout aircraft be stealthy, which was a major reason why costs escalated enough to kill the RAH-66 Comanche scout helicopter in 2004.
One option for FARA is a smaller version of the V-280 Valor, depicted here.
There are a few candidates that fit the bill for FARA—sort of. The Sikorsky S-97 Raider (see top image) was built as part of a previous effort to field a new Army scout helicopter, but is a little too big to safely fly down city streets. Another possibility is a scout chopper based on the Bell V-280 Valor. But tiltrotors are notoriously wide aircraft because of the side-by-side configuration of the rotors, making them too big to fly down foreign boulevards. Alternately, the Army could look at adapting an existing light helicopter design.
In related news, the Army will fly the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter "well into the 2040s," per Military.com. Although the service will someday replace the AH-64, possibly with an armed version of the Raider or Valor, the commander of the Army's Aviation Center of Excellence, Maj. Gen. William Gayler, recently said, "the timing of what replaces (the Apache) and the affordability what replaces it has yet to be seen." The Army is currently buying the latest version of the Apache, the AH-64E Apache Guardian.
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