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Sikorsky’s Optionally Piloted Black Hawk Makes First Flight, ‘Zero-Pilot’ Flights Planned for 2020

Dan Parsons By
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Sikorsky’s Optionally Piloted Black Hawk Makes First Flight, ‘Zero-Pilot’ Flights Planned for 2020
A Black Hawk equipped with optionally-piloted vehicle (OPV) technology made its first flight at Sikorsky’s West Palm Beach, Fla., facility on May 29. Sikorsky is developing autonomous and OPV technology that builds on its fly-by-wire technology to ultimately reduce the number one cause of helicopter crashes: Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT). Photo courtesy Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company.

For the better part of an hour on May 29, one of the oldest existing UH-60 Black Hawks was flown with a full-authority fly-by-wire flight control system that eventually could allow the aircraft to fly without a pilot on board. Sikorsky [LMT] has developed a kit that removes all legacy mechanical flight controls from the aircraft and replaces them with its MATRIX technology to make it an optionally piloted vehicle. The company uses the phrase “optimally piloted vehicle” almost interchangeably…

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