DARPA's ARES first flight delayed to next fall

A bevy of new vertical take off and landing (VTOL) aircraft conceived to take the military beyond the speed, range and altitude limits of helicopters are scheduled to fly over the next two years. None looks more like science fiction becoming science fact than a sort of flying candy crane formerly known as “Transformer.”

What is now called the Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) is being built by prime contractor Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works with Piasecki Aircraft of Essington, Penn., under a $77 million DARPA contract. Lockheed is providing the software, Piasecki the hardware.

The hardware is a 41-foot span, unmanned flying wing in a tiltrotor configuration. Two ducted proprotors about eight feet in diameter, embedded near a stubby fuselage, will swivel up to let ARES take off and land like a helicopter and tilt forward to let it fly like an airplane.

The fuselage will be able to carry various plug-and-play payload modules – cargo, sensors, life support gear, even remote-control ground attack weapons are among the ideas — and deliver them to troops on austere battlefields or let those troops employ them.

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To lift its “useful load” — payload module plus fuel — of up to 3,000 lbs., the 7,000-lb. maximum takeoff weight ARES demonstrator will be powered by two non-tilting Honeywell Aerospace HTS900 helicopter engines in the fuselage, each generating 989 horsepower. Ashish Bagai, DARPA program manager, expects the aircraft to cruise as fast as 170 knots (195 mph), with a ceiling of 20,000 feet, and have a mission radius of about 175 miles out and back. But that’s just the demonstrator. The contractors are working toward a variant able to cruise at 250 knots with a mission radius similar to the V-22 Osprey.

First flight was expected last June, but Bagai said that was delayed because “some developmental items have required some additional testing.” The drive train, which borrows gears from the Sikorsky CH-53E helicopter but whose proprotors, their ducts and other parts “are all unique and brand new,” Bagai said, are among them. “Nothing else of this sort exists.”

ARES is now scheduled to fly next fall at earliest, a few weeks after the September 2017 flight of Bell Helicopter’s new V-280 Valor tiltrotor and Sikorsky-Boeing’s SB>1 Defiant compound helicopter, both being built for the Army-led Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator program.

breakingdefense.com...

a reply to: anzha

Piasecki has always been one of those companies that seemed to watch old Thunderbirds episodes and thought to themselves "you know, I like the concept, but I really wish that Gerry Anderson's designs were more adventurous".

At least, that's the only thing (other than a misguided attempt at replacing the jolly ranchers in the engineering break room's candy jar with peyote buttons) that could have possibly explained the helistat:

*SPOILER ALERT*
It "flew" exactly as well as one might guess, RIP.

I'm glad to see that they're still up to their usual insanity. They were darned close to this in the 60s, and I'd love to see what they can accomplish with modern flight control software.

This seems like an even more mature/functional version of that powered parasailing mule drone, and it could do amazing things for folks like the USMC if they get i right.

Saaaay this drone stuff is fun..Lets just make one "Bigger"..

Perfect for casualty extractions.