UH-60 Black Hawk Cargo Drone (U-Hawk)

[M2]

If anyone was wondering why the U.S. Army plans to cut 6,500 aviation jobs from the active duty ranks over the next two years, here's your answer!

UH-60 Black Hawk Cargo Drone With Clamshell Nose Breaks Cover

The new U-Hawk can lug thousands of pounds of cargo internally that would never fit in a standard Black Hawk, and launch scores of its own drones and munitions.



Sikorsky has unveiled a new, fully uncrewed version of the Black Hawk helicopter with a completely transformed front end that swaps out the cockpit for clamshell doors. Depending on how it is configured, what has been dubbed the U-Hawk can move thousands of pounds of outsized cargo internally and slung underneath, deploy uncrewed ground vehicles, and fire dozens of “launched effects” like surveillance and reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions.

A U-Hawk demonstrator, converted from an ex-U.S. Army UH-60L, is on display at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual conference in Washington, D.C., which opened today and at which TWZ is in attendance. Sikorsky, now a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, also refers to the design as the S-70 Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), with S-70 being the company’s internal model number for H-60 variants.

“A lot of our customers said, hey, I need to be able to move things into theater, and I need to be able to move them in mass. And a lot of the drones out there may be able to carry 100 pounds, may be able to carry 500 pounds,” Rich Benton, Sikorsky Vice President and General Manager, told TWZ and other outlets during a press call earlier this month. “We look introspectively, what do we have? Well, we actually have an autonomous Black Hawk today, our OPV, optionally piloted. But why couldn’t we just take the cockpit out of that and make that a UAS?”...

Full story: https://www.twz.com/air/uh-60-black-hawk-cargo-drone-with-clamshell-nose-breaks-cover

[Bigred]