| Sikorsky S-70B |
With its latest S-70B, Sikorsky Aircraft has created an anti-ship and anti-submarine warfare platform with a glass cockpit and automated mission avionics system designed to meet a wide range of needs for navies around the world.
Aimed at the international naval market, this version of the Seahawk has a Sikorsky-developed mission avionics package. It competes against other new helicopters being offered to navies, including the Lockheed Martin-developed MH-60R Romeo, an advanced version of the Seahawk now entering service with the U.S. Navy, and Europe's NFH90.
Interest in new naval helicopters is high in part because the current global fleet, mainly Sea Kings, is aging and also because of growing threats to vital sea lanes and offshore resources from quiet diesel submarines and fast attack boats. Sikorsky has developed the new S-70B to offer an exportable combination of anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capability. The latest version of the S-70B has been in development since 2004, and work on it is nearly complete.
The S-70B can carry a variety of sensors and weapons, including the Penguin anti-ship missile, dipping sonar and homing anti-submarine torpedoes. Just how the helicopter will be configured with weapons and mission systems will depend on the customer, but it is intended to be versatile enough to handle a wide range of requirements. The underlying architecture includes 5 multifunction displays. There is no separate mission computer; some of the PowerPCs for the displays do that job.
Sikorsky's engineers realized that the new S-70B mission system needed to be highly configurable to adapt to the various needs of international customers, so they set about creating a federated avionics system that can manage large amounts of flight and mission data while helping the crew with newly automated functions.
The S-70B can carry up to three weapons at a time on its three hard points - two inboard stations and an outboard one on the left side.
The aircraft is powered by two GE Aviation T700-GE-401C turboshaft engines with a combined shaft horsepower of 3,426 for takeoff. It has a maximum gross weight of 21,884 lb., maximum payload capacity of about 6,680 lb., maximum cruise speed of 146 kts. and endurance of approximately 4 hr.
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