Bell Textron's V-280 Valor tiltrotor assault aircraft will replace the Army's Black Hawk combat attack helicopter fleet. It will now be known as the U.S. Army's Bell MV-75 Future Long Range Assault Aircraft. [Photo: Bell]
Two years after winning the U.S. Army’s biggest helicopter competition in 40 years—replacing the famed Black Hawk with a Future Long Range Assault Aircraft—Fort Worth-based Bell Textron announced a new factory in AllianceTexas will manufacture components for the next-gen tilt-rotor aircraft.
Slated to replace the Army's famed Black Hawk combat attack helicopter—and potentially worth $70 billion across the life of the fleet—Bell's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft deploys mature tiltrotor technology and innovative digital engineering. Bell says it will be "the most reliable, affordable, and high-performing long-range assault aircraft in the world."
The Army's biggest helicopter competition in 40 years has a winner in Fort Worth. Bell Textron's V-280 Valor is slated to replace around 2,000 Black Hawk helicopters by 2030—with a tiltrotor design that lets it take off like a chopper and fly like a plane.
Designed for long-range assault missions, the Valor's initial contract is worth up to $1.3 billion. But the program could ultimately be worth $70 billion across the life of the fleet, including foreign military sales, Defense News reports.
Defense tech firm Shield AI said it completed a live drone swarm exercise in Taiwan in which three Taiwanese-built drones flew a coordinated search mission under its Hivemind AI software instead of human pilots....
Dallas-based Stream Data Centers has named Nikki Kresse its chief human resources officer. She is joining an executive bench that has been evolving since Apollo funds took majority control of the hyperscale developer in August 2025....
Richardson-based Mavenir has hired a longtime Nokia executive to lead its expansion into a fast-growing corner of the cloud computing market known as neocloud. Neocloud is industry shorthand for providers that sell access to graphics processing units, or GPUs, built for AI and other high-performance workloads as a service....
Defense tech firm Shield AI said it completed a live drone swarm exercise in Taiwan in which three Taiwanese-built drones flew a coordinated search mission under its Hivemind AI software instead of human pilots....
Dallas-based Stream Data Centers has named Nikki Kresse its chief human resources officer. She is joining an executive bench that has been evolving since Apollo funds took majority control of the hyperscale developer in August 2025....
Richardson-based Mavenir has hired a longtime Nokia executive to lead its expansion into a fast-growing corner of the cloud computing market known as neocloud. Neocloud is industry shorthand for providers that sell access to graphics processing units, or GPUs, built for AI and other high-performance workloads as a service....