Boeing was the last of 5 companies authorized to compete for the initial selection of the FARA program, for Futur Attack and Reconnaissance Aircraft, not to have officially presented its concept. It is througha video and a section on the Boeing website that this public presentation was made this Tuesday, March 3. Without major surprises vis-à-vis our previous deductions, Boeing is positioned on an intermediate segment between Bell's Invictus 360 and Sikorsky's Raider-X, with an offer that is intended to be attractive, from a technological point of view, but also from a budgetary point of view.
Let's start by presenting what the Seattle aerospace firm is unveiling today. The model, soberly named "Boeing FARA", sits well, as we had supposed, on a unique architecture among the 5 competitors, with a main rotor with 6 blades, a small propeller propeller on the tail, and an anti-torque rotor offset upstream of the latter. This configuration, very close to that proposed for the "Super Apache", has the merit of simplicity, since the power of the propellant is directly captured on the single turbine, just like what is practiced for traditional helicopter anti-torque rotors. Therefore, the device will effectively have a speed higher than a helicopter like the Bell 360 Invictus, but without the complexity of the Raider-X counter-rotating rotor.
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