Overview
- The H-60Mx Black Hawk, delivered to the Army on Friday, enters months of DEVCOM trials to prove smooth handoffs between crewed, remote, and fully autonomous flight.
- The helicopter can fly with a pilot, be steered from a tablet on the ground, or operate on its own to lower workload and keep crews out of high‑risk airspace.
- The upgrade adds full‑authority fly‑by‑wire controls and Sikorsky’s MATRIX software, which supports obstacle avoidance, terrain awareness, landing‑zone picks, and flight in poor visibility.
- DARPA also handed over a MATRIX software kit that lets the Army integrate new sensors and third‑party tools for mission experiments.
- The aircraft is the primary testbed for the SAFE program to scale an autonomy kit across Black Hawks, building on ALIAS milestones from uncrewed flights in 2022 to recent field demos and parallel work on Sikorsky’s cockpit‑less U‑Hawk.