Airbus still bullish on unmanned UH-72 despite US Army replacement effort
Airbus remains optimistic about the future business potential for its UH-72 Lakota utility helicopter in North America, despite nascent plans by the US Army to replace the light-twin as its primary trainer aircraft.
The US arm of Airbus Defence & Space has recently announced a set of partnerships with other defence contractors to support the conversion of the latest UH-72B into an uncrewed logistics platform.
At the recent Army Aviation Association of America conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Airbus and military systems integrator L3Harris announced they will team up to reconfigure standard UH-72Bs into a fully autonomous vehicle, which Airbus has dubbed the MQ-72C.
“Having an uncrewed variant of the Lakota clearly is something that would give it a very long runway in terms of its utility,” Rob Geckle, chief executive of Airbus US Space & Defense, tells FlightGlobal.
Airbus is competing the concept vehicle for the US Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector (ALC) rapid prototyping initiative. The opportunity has taken on increasing importance the company, after the US Army in October revealed it was exploring replacement options for the Lakota.
The agreement with L3Harris see the systems integrator add a Pentagon-mandated modular open systems architecture digital backbone into the rotorcraft, including integrated command and control nodes. The pairing follows a similar announcement in April, in which Airbus said it had selected Shield AI to provide the MQ-72C’s autonomy software.
Shield AI is perhaps best known as the company that developed the artificial intelligence agent that controlled a heavily modified Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter in an aerial combat project run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Physically, the MQ-72C configuration will see the cockpit station replaced with a cargo compartment and forward opening access door in the nose. A second cargo access door will be added to the rear section of the fuselage, along with the UH-72’s two standard side fuselage doors.
Geckle says Airbus is aiming to produce a minimum viable prototype of the design by 2028, with a final design to be ready by 2029.
The company has existing production capacity available at its UH-72 production facility in Columbus, Mississippi. L3Harris notes it also has available factory capacity at its sites in Waco and Greenville, Texas.
Renderings of the MQ-72C show a fuselage with the same outer mold line shape to the UH-72B. Geckle says he expects the uncrewed derivative will be similar enough to the standard Lakota that it would be able to take advantage of Airbus’s “efficiency proposition”.
The company has invested more than $20 million of internal research and development funds to mature development of the MQ-72C, in addition to contracts under the ALC programme.
Airbus is competing against a team of Near Earth, Leonardo and Honeywell, who have offered a similarly converted AW139-based solution.