Army names its first tiltrotor aircraft: Cheyenne II

NASHVILLE—The Army is continuing to name its airframes after Indigenous tribes with its first tiltrotor aircraft. The MV-75 is officially the Cheyenne II, the service’s undersecretary announced Wednesday at the Army Aviation Warfighting Summit.

Members of the tribe have served in every U.S. armed service and during every major conflict, said Undersecretary Mike Obadal, a relationship that “evolved from warfare to mutual respect and finally into an unbroken legacy of patriotic service.”

“In the Army, system names carry both history and expectations,” Obadal said. “With the MV-75, we honor a legacy forged in conflict, proven in battle, originally known to the U.S. Army as some of the most formidable and disciplined adversaries on the battlefield.”

The II is a nod to the Army’s original Cheyenne, a Vietnam War-era attack helicopter program that was canceled before entering production in 1972.

The new Cheyenne has been more than  a decade in the making, originally the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, part of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift program. The service’s then-chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, announced earlier this year that the latest prototypes, which have evolved from Bell-Textron’s V-280 Valor, will be fielded to units for testing by the end of the year.

Envisioned as an eventual replacement for the UH-60 Black Hawk, the Cheyenne is the Army’s first foray into tiltrotor aviation, decades after the Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy all integrated the V-22 Osprey into their aviation communities. 

It “carries the lessons of the past and the present into the future,” Obadal said.

Bell-Textron and the Army are integrating some of the lessons learned at deadly cost from the Osprey, including a fixed engine rather than one that tilts with the rotors.

“Now that may seem like a minor difference, but when it comes to maintenance, reliability, cost, impact from vibration or utilization, we found that fixed engine is likely to result in less maintenance requirements, less complexity,” Col. Tyler Partridge, who commands the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Campbelly, Ky., told Defense One in March.

The Army and Bell-Textron will officially unveil the aircraft Wednesday at the Army Aviation Warfighting Summit.