The United States Department of Defense’s Future Vertical Lift Program has been working to develop a new generation of improved vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft for the U.S. Armed Forces.
The program aims to find a replacement for the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk, which is close to retirement. However, the program may have found a potential successor – Bell Helicopter’s V-280 – which incorporates carbon fiber in the helicopter’s wing, fuselage and tail.
The V-280 has 11 investing partners who worked on various elements of the plane, including: GKN Aerospace (the plane’s tail structure), Spirit AeroSystems (the plane’s fuselage), Eagle Technologies (the tiltrotor), and Toray Composites America (supplied carbon fiber prepregs).
According to Aviation Week, the V-280’s “major components” are its carbon fiber wing, prop rotor gearbox and composite yoke for the rotor hub. The outlet adds that the wing is the first use of large-cell carbon core composites—a sandwich of carbon-fiber skins and honeycomb. The hub yoke is laid up from composite fabrics and uses open-face tooling around the edges. The V-280 also has the first all-carbon tiltrotor blade. All of these elements helped cut overall weight and cost for the helicopter.
