WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working with 4 firms to design an experimental vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft that may fly at speeds far faster than the V-22 Osprey.
The collaboration comes because the U.S. military considers how it would operate aircraft in areas that lack traditional runways.
DARPA calls its program SPRINT, for Speed and Runway Independent Technologies. In November, the agency awarded contracts to Aurora Flight Sciences, Bell Textron, Northrop Grumman and Piasecki Aircraft Corp. to begin honing their ideas. The entire value for these 4 deals, which cover the initial phase, could possibly be value $15 million to $20 million, depending on what options the agency exercises.
By spring of 2027, DARPA wants certainly one of those firms to have finished designing and prototyping their aircraft, built it, and carried out its first flight.
Navy Cmdr. Ian Higgins, SPRINT’s program manager, said in a Dec. 15 interview that speed is certainly one of the important thing requirements for this aircraft. When the SPRINT aircraft flies forward, DARPA wants it to achieve speeds between 400 and 450 knots, or about 460 to 520 mph. The V-22 Osprey has a maximum speed of 270 knots.
“What we … wish to find a way to attain is higher-end speeds,” Higgins said. “We’re going one other 100-plus knots beyond [the Osprey], which itself challenges physics if you happen to were just to make use of the propulsion system that’s within the Osprey.”
Higgins said the SPRINT aircraft also must find a way to hover and be stable, transition between hovering and forward flight, and have a distributed power system during that transition that effectively powers all of the propulsion systems. Higgins said SPRINT is just not specializing in the survivability or potential payload of those concepts.
In terms of achieving those goals, DARPA is giving the competing firms wide latitude. For instance, he said, firms can resolve whether their aircraft must be crewed or uncrewed, or flown autonomously or semi-autonomously.
“Straight away, it’s in every single place,” Higgins said.
Concept art to date released suggests the range of strategies firms might employ for his or her SPRINT submissions. In a Nov. 27 release, Bell Textron revealed art showing an Osprey-like tiltrotor design on an apparently uncrewed aircraft, hovering above a platform at sea.
Bell said its SPRINT submission will mix a helicopter’s hover capability with the speed, range and survivability of a jet aircraft. The corporate also plans to leverage its previous work on high-speed VTOL technology. Bell is conducting risk-reduction testing of its folding rotor, integrated propulsion and flight control technologies at Holloman Air Force Base in Latest Mexico.
Aurora, a Boeing subsidiary, said in its own release that it’s designing a high-lift, low-drag, fan-in-wing aircraft that uses a blended wing body and embedded engines for forward flight, in addition to embedded lift fans linked to its engines for vertical flight.
The concept image Aurora released shows its aircraft’s proposed blended wing body, not far off from the Boeing X-48 design. Aurora said it is usually using ideas from its Excalibur uncrewed aircraft, which used jet-borne vertical lift with electric lift fans that retract into the wing during forward flight.
The SPRINT contracts to date awarded cover the initial six-month conceptual design phase. By May 2024, the businesses may have to persuade DARPA that their concept will work and may result in a primary flight in 2027.
DARPA will then cut at the very least one contender and move to the subsequent 12- to 15-month phase. At that time, DARPA expects the businesses to have their preliminary design complete, and the sector shall be further winnowed.
The potential uses for high-speed vertical lift aircraft are vast, Higgins said. They might include use by special operations forces, and for mobility and logistics operations, personnel recovery, medical transport, and evacuation missions, he added — anything that requires an aircraft to quickly move out and in of bizarre areas. And in a future war, Higgins said, the military might need aircraft capable of take off and land from streets, open fields, cratered flightlines or other locations without traditional runways — after which get away quickly.
“It really does open up the potential of [being used in] all those mission sets,” Higgins said.
Straight away, the technologies that will be used for SPRINT aren’t earmarked for any existing project. Higgins acknowledged the project may not turn into anything, but he hopes the tech could at some point be folded right into a program of record.
“The great thing about DARPA is we pose these difficult problems which will or might not be achievable, and we see what the present cutting-edge is,” Higgins said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.