Sikorsky on Track for U-Hawk First Flight Next Year

Sikorsky Aircraft’s upcoming fully autonomous UH-60L Black Hawk variant, the S-70UAS U-Hawk, is on track to perform its first test flight next year. Speaking to reporters during the Dubai Airshow on Monday, Sikorsky confirmed that the program has already registered worldwide interest in a capability that could include “reusing airframes that are already in the system.”

Revealed in October at a U.S. Army conference in Washington, the U-Hawk went from “concept to what we call concrete in 10 months,” Ramsey Bentley, Sikorsky’s director of strategy and business development for advanced programs, told reporters during the briefing.

The platform trades a cockpit for 25% more cargo space and employs a fly-by-wire flight control system that integrates with Sikorsky’s Matrix autonomous flight technology. Bentley described this as “a very mature system working on multiple configurations of aircraft—rotary, fixed-wing aircraft, and also UAS [uncrewed aerial systems].”

U-Hawk flights are remotely operated using tablets, and the development team tested the flight control system by giving the tablet to four-star generals and 19-year-old trainees. “They’ve all had no issue,” Bentley said.

“The tablet allows you to actually take the aircraft from a ground start all the way through the flight and shut down the aircraft,” Bentley noted, “so the aircraft is fully able to handle all the emergency procedures and everything else, just like a human pilot would in the aircraft.”

Alongside new-builds, “there might be another use for an [older UH-60] aircraft to extend its life by this different sort of autonomous application,” Beth Parcella, Sikorsky's vice president of strategy and business development, said during the briefing. However, “to reinstall a cockpit would probably be cost-prohibitive at that point.”