Spinoffs And Specialties Of Sikorsky’s Black Hawk

Since its first flight in 1974, Sikorsky’s S-70/UH-60 Black Hawk has spawned dozens of variants and is as famous and ubiquitous as the aircraft it was designed to replace, Bell’s UH-1 Huey.

Thousands of Black Hawks have served and continue to do so in a multitude of missions across the globe—from battlefield logistics hauler and aerial firefighter to armed gunship and extractor of special forces behind front lines.

• The company is continuing Matrix development with the UH-60 demonstrator
• The airframe appears to have inspired Chinese Z-20 helicopter design

Adapted models such as the SH-60 Seahawk hunt submarines from aircraft carriers and warships. A commercial version, the S-92, that uses essentially the same dynamic system as the Black Hawk but with a new airframe, flies everyone from petroleum workers to world leaders.

The Black Hawk’s design has also inspired imitators, with the airframe of China’s Harbin Z-20 a clear example. The People’s Liberation Army used the S-70 extensively from the 1980s until military exports to China were halted.

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Throughout its life, this rotary-wing workhorse has also been adapted to test and prove technologies—some publicly, others less so.

Here are some of the more interesting Black Hawk modifications, trials, developments and spinoffs that have piqued Aviation Week’s interest over the years:

Robot Hawk For the last decade, Sikorsky has been considering putting a switch in the Black Hawk cockpit labeled 2-1-0—two pilots, one or none. It was finally able to make that happen in 2022 with the Matrix technology, demonstrating it for DARPA’s Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS). After dozens of flight tests with a safety crew onboard, Sikorsky demonstrated a fully autonomous mission from engine start and takeoff to mission, then landing and engine shutdown. Controlled from a tablet computer, the autonomy software can follow a preplanned mission but is able to handle contingencies and replan the flight to avoid obstacles and threats detected by onboard sensors, such as lidar.

Sikorsky has fitted the Matrix system to a UH-60A and an S-76, and the technology has also been tested on fixed-wing aircraft such as the Cessna Caravan and the ATR 72.

Stealth Hawk Mystery remains about the mysterious remains left behind in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after Operation Neptune Spear, which killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in May 2011. Special forces destroyed much of the wreckage of the highly modified stealthy Black Hawk that crash-landed into bin Laden’s urban compound, but they left behind the tail rotor, stabilizers and part of the tail boom, which revealed the extent of the modifications made to the aircraft. While efforts to reduce the radar cross-section of rotorcraft are not new, the extent of the modifications on the Abbottabad Black Hawk were much more extensive than those seen previously on types such as the Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche.

Since then, little has been heard of low-observability efforts around the Black Hawk, except for publication of imagery online of what could be an early iteration, albeit focused on electronic warfare. That aircraft featured extensive modifications to the upper fuselage and main rotor head to reduce radar reflections (AW&ST May 16, 2011, p. 34). While such technology is unlikely to find widespread use, it showed that such modified helicopters could still be used in extreme high-threat environments.

Radar Hawk In the late 1970s, the U.S. Army’s Standoff Target Acquisition System aimed to develop an airborne radar to detect ground targets on the battlefield. This system, then being developed by Motorola, would be carried by a heavily modified Black Hawk with a large rotating antenna beneath the fuselage. Plans called for the purchase of some 120 EH-60s equipped with the system. However, cost increases with the radar system resulted in the project’s termination in 1981. Considerable lessons nonetheless were learned for the next generation of ground-moving-target-indicator-equipped (GMTI) aircraft, including the Northrop Grumman E-8 Joint Stars aircraft, which was in U.S. Air Force service until last year.

Turkish Hawk When describing the international footprint of the Black Hawk program, Lockheed Martin executives refer to its production in the U.S. and Poland, but rarely do they mention Turkey. Turkish Aerospace Industries assembles a Black Hawk called the T-70 that is equipped with a locally developed avionics suite and self-defense systems. The T-70 is also being equipped with locally assembled landing gears, gearboxes and dynamic components. Some 109 are supposed to be built in Turkey, with 38 already built or in assembly. However, license approvals for the balance are being withheld due to sanctions over Turkey’s acquisition of a Russian air defense system.