Army fields new Black Hawk.

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THE Army began fielding the latest version of its Black Hawk helicopter in December with delivery of UH-60Ms to the 101st Airborne Division's 159th Combat Aviation Brigade.

The UH-60M will gradually replace the 25-year-old L model and will become the Army's standard medium-lift helicopter for assault, medical-evacuation and cargo missions, as well as for command and control, aerial sustainment, and search and rescue. The UH-60M will also be looked at as a follow-on helicopter for special-operations units, said Chief Warrant Officer 4 Gene McNeill, a test pilot and UH-60M instructor at Sikorsky.

"What I like about this aircraft is the extreme precise accuracy of navigation using imbedded GPS and INS technologies," McNeill said. "That translates to increased situational awareness on the battlefield at all times.

"With a digital moving map you know exactly where you are with relationship to the earth. It enables you to execute your mission a lot better, because you don't have to do manual calculations--the aircraft's digital suite makes everything faster," he said.

UH-60M pilots will also be able to download all flight information from an office computer to a two-gigabyte card, which is then used to download to the Black Hawk's computer system.

"What that means is I can walk out to my aircraft with a flight plan and my entire mission loaded onto the card--all my intelligence data, my frequencies, my waypoints, then dump them into my aircraft and load it into the flight management system," McNeill said.

The new Black Hawk also has a "threat intervisibility" system that allows terrain data and known enemy positions to be plotted on a moving map display in the cockpit. This allows the pilot to keep the aircraft masked by terrain and out of the range of enemy fire.

--J.D. Leipold, ARNEWS