ALL THINGS CYBER
isn’t just a new rotorcraft, it’s a leap forward in how the Army plans, flies and fights in tomorrow’s conflicts.
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“It’s a game-changing capability in terms of speed and range,” said Col. Jeffrey Poquette, FLRAA project manager at Program Executive Office (PEO) for Avia- tion. He characterized the next-generation tiltrotor assault aircraft (designed by Bell Textron) as “twice as far, twice as fast” at the annual Association of the U.S. Army Global Force Symposium, held in Huntsville, Alabama, in March 2025. Te imple- mentation of digital engineering will be “a digital engineering pathfinder for the Army,” serving as a model for how digital engineering can be adopted and imple- mented by the Department of Defense (DOD) acquisition enterprise to improve efficiency, reduce costs and accelerate the development and test of capabilities. Te challenge, he said, is that this is new territory, but the level of insight that the government gets into the design is unprecedented and “what we get from that is ensuring that we build the right thing.”
Gone are the days of building something, setting it aside and forgetting it. Digital engineering allows the Army to leverage the power of technology to create a design digitally and determine the impact of changes to that design prior to bending metal.
“Digital engineering isn’t magic,” said Poquette. “It’s just a really deep look in a common environment where we have a single source of truth. We never don’t know what the design is today. I can take my phone out right now and look at the design and see where we are … that’s powerful.”
Poquette said when prototypes are built and tested, often things are found that have to be fixed. Some of those fixes could be big, some could be expensive, and they inevitably will extend the timeline of the acquisition because the test program gets much longer.
“I’m not even going to say that digital engineering is faster upfront. It’s an investment in time. It’s an investment in intellectual capital. But when we build the prototypes we’re going to be so confident that anything we need to fix should be small, should not be expensive, and that we can quickly fix those prototypes, continue on with the test program and get the capability into Soldiers’ hands as soon as possible,” Poquette stated. “Together [with industry] collaboratively, we’re going to build the aircraft that meets the Army’s requirements and is truly going to change the nature of the assault aviation platform.”
FLRAA COMES TO FRUITION Te science and technology (S&T) effort behind FLRAA began in 2013 as the Joint Multi-Role Tech Demonstrator program, which was aimed at proving out a plat- form that could fly twice as far, twice as fast and be sized appropriately for the Army. As the S&T effort transitioned to an acquisition program, the question became
https://asc.ar my.mil 5
s the battlefield evolves, so must the aircraft that support and protect Soldiers on the ground. Te Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) aims to do just that—ushering in a new era of speed, range and adaptability. Backed by cutting-edge digital engineering, FLRAA
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