Aviation tech firm Skyryse has partnered with Black Hawk reseller Ace Aeronautics to integrate SkyOS—a universal flight control system that simplifies aircraft handling, into hundreds of the military helicopters.
Any mention of reversion to manual control when the digital do-hickeys go Tango Uniform? I built and fly a personal helicopter. Say what you will about AN hardware; its robustness means that it has nearly a century of proven performance, condition inspectability, and ease of field-service. Don’t talk to me about digital MTBF’s; I’ve had plenty of electronics that bench-tested fine, yet were DOA onsite or shortly thereafter.
I spent sixty years working with digital hardware and dealing with magic-smoke; I intend to depart this plane without ever setting foot in a drive-by-wire land vehicle, much less an aircraft. Including Airbus.
ACE isn’t even a military contractor. They sell used and civilian Blackhawks. Furthermore, I looked up Skyryse SkyOS, and that thing is in its infancy, not even IFR certified yet (pitched as “ultimate helicopter IFR solution”) and never installed into anything but Robinsons.
So what happened is, Skyryse found a retailer for their thingamajig and hope to get a Black Hawk from them to test it in it, and ACE will pitch SkyOS to their customers as an option.
US military is not involved in any of this, except for selling old choppers to ACE.
Now for the redundancy, every picture of SkyOS I see is, two screesn and single stick for everything. It’s still a single point of failure. I imagine it has emergency autohover and emergency autoland, so it’s fine for private operators, but militaries need more than that.