Honeywell has been selected to provide the Bell MV-75 tiltrotor with its environmental control system (ECS) and auxiliary power unit (APU), it said Monday at the Paris Air Show. Previously designated as the V-280 Valor, the tiltrotor was selected to answer the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft requirement in December 2022.
Bell Textron announced the official MV-75 designation for the production aircraft last month, honoring the Army’s founding year, 1775. A demonstrator has been flying since December 2017.
Both Honeywell subsystems draw on a long history of providing reliable and efficient equipment for military and commercial applications. The ECS for the MV-75 is part of the company’s Attune family of thermal management systems and requires minimal changes to adapt it to the tiltrotor. It uses the latest high-density cooling technology that brings significant benefits in terms of size, weight, and power requirements, such as a 35% weight reduction. The high-speed centrifugal compressor is 20% more efficient than previous units.
In the meantime, the APU is a secondary power/hydraulic supply system based on Honeywell’s 36-150, of which more than 10,000 are flying on more than 20 platform types. They include the UH-60 Black Hawk and AH-64 Apache that form the backbone of the U.S. Army’s current assault and attack fleets, with considerable benefits in terms of logistics, sustainability, and existing knowledge base. The APU requires a new gearbox to adapt it to the MV-75 but is otherwise similar to the current 36-150.
Honeywell’s selection to provide these subsystems is based not only on their high performance, but also represents a low-risk approach as both the ECS and APU are demonstrating their high reliability on a variety of platforms daily.
Recently, the U.S. Army announced that it wished to accelerate the entry into service of the MV-75, bringing forward the initial planned date of 2030 by up to two years, albeit at the expense of some testing. The maturity of Honeywell’s subsystems suggests that they will not hinder that process, which is targeting the first MV-75 flight in 2027 following a critical design review next year.