A CH-47 Chinook replacement remains a major unknown when it comes to the U.S. Army’s Future Vertical Lift vision.
The U.S. Army is actively exploring options for a new-generation heavy-lift rotorcraft to replace the CH-47 Chinook. Although plans are still very much in their infancy, they have broader implications for future heavy-lift capabilities, especially for the Pacific theater.
Confirmation that work on a Chinook successor is ongoing comes as the service progresses with its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) tiltrotor, which will replace part of the UH-60 Black Hawk fleet, and after its cancelation of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), which would have partially replaced the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior armed scout helicopter, now retired without any plans for a direct successor.
In response to a question from TWZ, Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, the director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team, or FVL CFT, at Army Futures Command, provided an update on Chinook replacement plans at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual symposium yesterday. Within the Army, this is known as Capability Set, or “Cape Set,” Four, part of the wider Future Vertical Lift (FVL) effort. FLRAA and FARA were responses to other FVL Capability Sets. Cap Set 4 also evolved in part from earlier efforts, including the Joint Heavy Lift (JHL) and Joint Multi-Role (JMR) programs.
It is important to note that Cape Set Four is not new and the Army announced the start of a new study into a potential Chinook replacement last year.
“We’ve done some initial studies on what a Cape Set Four looks like,” Brig. Gen. Baker explained. “Those studies are still ongoing, very, very cognizant of the size of it, the type of lift capabilities we want from it, but also the affordability of that.”
For Baker, Cape Set Four is very much a lower priority than FLRAA, which is anticipated to enter low-rate initial production in 2028 after which units will start to use them operationally in 2030.
Baker continued: “We will start looking eventually at Cape Set Four, as we get the feedback on what we see out in industry that’s available, and then, more importantly, does it potentially meet the requirements that we think we need.”
Of those requirements, Baker listed longer range, heavier payload, and fuel efficiency.
While Baker admitted that there is still “a lot of work to do on Cape Set Four,” he also made clear that “it is definitely out there on the horizon that we’ve got to look at.”
In the meantime, the Army’s Chinook fleet — which numbers more than 470 aircraft — will soldier on as the service’s heavy-lift rotorcraft for many more years to come. This could be aided by the latest Chinook Block II upgrade program. This includes new rotor blades, a revised fuel tank configuration, and other improvements, while there is also a separate option to add more powerful General Electric T408 engines. So far, however, the Army has only bought them for its special operations units.
“We’re going to ride the Chinook like we’re riding the C-130” added Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, Commanding General at the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence and Fort Novosel, also speaking at AUSA and referencing the Air Force’s long-lived turboprop transport plane.
Nevertheless, the Army’s determination to field a Chinook replacement at some point in the future is a notable turnaround, compared with previous comments.
“There is no plan right now for a Cape Set Four or Five and the Army has been pretty consistent in saying that” Gen. John Murray, then the commanding general of Army Futures Command, declared in May 2021. “The FARA — Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft — and the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft are the two plans, [or] programs, we have working right now. There is nothing working for a replacement for the CH-47.”
While that plan has now changed, it’s likely that the current focus on FLRAA has highlighted the demand for greater speed and range in the vertical-lift domain, especially in the Pacific scenario.
The Army is already preparing for the step-change in vertical-lift capability that the FLRAA promises to bring.
This will include a new ability to conduct Large-Scale, Long-Range Air Assault, or L2A2, operations, defined by the ability to “deliver one Brigade Combat Team in one period of darkness, over 500 miles, arriving behind enemy lines, and be able to conduct sustained combat operations,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, head of the 101st Airborne Division, said during a separate talk at AUSA.
L2A2 currently relies upon a fast-flying tiltrotor to be realized, with the specific range and speed advantage of Bell’s V-280 Valor demonstrator very likely being a major factor behind its choice for FLRAA instead of Boeing’s rival SB>1 Defiant. FLRAA is derived from the V-280 design.
How this does or doesn’t translate to a heavy-lift rotorcraft is an open question. There is no tiltrotor in this category currently flying or in development — although the idea has certainly been raised in the past — leaving a dearth of any kind of platform that can fulfill the Army’s Cape Set Four requirements.
While the structural and performance enhancements introduced in the Chinook Block II program add speed and lift to an airframe design that’s now over 60 years old, the helicopter offers nothing close to FLRAA levels of performance. At the same time, Chinook Block II has always been seen as a stopgap until a replacement platform can be defined, a conundrum Cape Set Four is now grappling with.
Other than the Chinook, the only other suitable heavy-lift rotorcraft currently in production is the CH-53K King Stallion, as operated by the U.S. Marine Corps.
This program has been anything but trouble-free, with issues during its development prompting a demand from Congress that the Marines examine potential alternatives, such as the Chinook.
On top of the Chinook Block II, another potential stopgap solution for the Army would be to re-engine its CH-47 fleet with T408 engines. This would provide a significantly more capable helicopter, building on its speed, payload, and hot-and-high performance. The T408s engines each produce 7,500 shaft horsepower (shp), around 2,500 shp more than the T55-GA-714As on standard CH-47F models.
In the past, the Army’s reluctance to re-engine its Chinooks — and to buy Block IIs for regular Army units — seemed to be driven, at least in part, by a stated desire to move beyond the venerable design and instead look toward fielding a new heavy-lift rotary-wing aircraft, something that has previously attracted pushback from Congress.
However, for some years now, there’s been a growing realization that today’s Chinook is not survivable enough in some scenarios for potential future conflicts with peer or near-peer adversaries.
“We needed a capability that could fly great distances at great speeds and penetrate, let’s say, a Russian air defense system,” Army Secretary Mark Esper told members of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, back in 2019, defending Army plans to shift funds from the Chinook to future aircraft programs and modernization programs.
“The decision, I think, for the CH-47s for the conventional Army — what probably changed was, when the National Defense Strategy was issued, it told us to move away from counterinsurgency to high-intensity conflict,” Esper added.
That means switching to advanced aircraft like the FLRAA tiltrotor and — until its cancelation — FARA, which emphasize high speed and long range as well as other measures to enhance their over survivability.
The survivability question, in general, is one that has consistently been raised about rotorcraft of all types, especially when it comes to future high-end fights. In the meantime, the dense air defense environment faced by tactical aircraft — including rotorcraft — in Ukraine has demonstrated the vulnerability of traditional platforms even when exposed to older-generation threats.
Along with concerns over rotorcraft survivability is the interest expressed by the Army (as well as the Marine Corps and Air Force) in distributed logistics chains, leveraging, at least in part, increasingly large uncrewed aerial cargo platforms. This could also raise questions about whether a new heavy-lift platform is necessary or cost-effective.
A video showing the Kaman KARGO drone, one of the uncrewed aerial cargo designs the Marine Corps is currently considering acquiring.
Another uncrewed option for future heavy-lift, vertical-lift requirements might be found in a fan-in-wing vertical take-off-and-landing capable type. Earlier this month, we reported on how Aurora Flight Sciences is working on a demonstrator aircraft in this category, as well as a scaled-up cargo aircraft based on the same technology. The demonstrator is being developed under a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program and reflects Air Force interest in a new high-speed, runway-independent special operations transport plane. If this concept actually comes to fruition and is operationally viable, it would provide a C-130-like payload with VTOL capability, and, even though it likely would not be procured by the Army, it could assume aspects of the mission set for the service.
Looking further ahead, the need for higher-performance vertical lift could potentially be provided by some kind of High-Speed Vertical Take-Off and Landing, or HSVTOL, aircraft. This is a concept that Bell is meanwhile has been working on, including now as part of the same DARPA program that Aurora’s lift fan design is under development for. While this kind of aircraft promises to combine the ability to take off and land vertically using rotors as well as fly at jet speeds in forward flight, it is still very much in its infancy and significant hurdles — especially as regards the nature of the propulsion system — still need to be overcome.
The experience with FARA demonstrates just how quickly Army requirements can change and be superseded.
With upgrades to ensure it remains relevant, the Chinook will be at the center of Army airlift for decades to come, but service officials are now talking openly about the need for a successor, even if that might not emerge until around the 2060s. With very few options, beyond more Chinooks, which don’t appear to meet long-term requirements, an all-new design currently looks almost certain.
