US Army to test SNC degraded visual environment sensor on ‘MX’ autonomous Black Hawk
The Degraded Visual Environment Pilotage System can see through dust, fog and smoke and is already flying with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
The US Army plans to equip its new autonomous-capable Sikorsky UH-60MX Black Hawk with an advanced sensor meant to assist pilots while operating in obscured conditions like brownouts and darkness.
Manufactured by Sierra Nevada (SNC), the Degraded Visual Environment Pilotage System (DVEPS) combines lidar and passive infrared imagery to generate a continuously updated three-dimensional model of the terrain below the aircraft.
The multi-sensor package allows pilots to peer through obscurants such as rain, snow, fog, dust, sand or smoke that can cause loss of situational awareness or disorientation.
On 13 October, SNC revealed the army will outfit its new optionally autonomous Black Hawk with the DVEPS during the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, which for the Pentagon spans from October to December 2026. Sikorsky delivered that aircraft to the army in March, supported by funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The MX Black Hawk is based on Sikorsky’s UH-60A Optionally Piloted Vehicle demonstrator, which has been flying without any pilots onboard since 2022. The rotorcraft uses a retrofitted fly-by-wire flight control system and Sikorsky’s Matrix software to execute flight operations without direct inputs from a pilot, remote or otherwise.
Sikorsky delivered the first experimental UH-60MX autonomous-capable Black Hawk in March 2026 under a funding contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Source: DARPA
On the UH-60MX, the DVEPS will provide Matrix with the sensor data needed to interpret the surrounding terrain and safely execute flight manoeuvres.
“Installing it on the H-60MX OPV converts a pilot-aid system into a machine-perception system, giving the aircraft’s autonomy software the equivalent of trained eyes rather than an unfiltered camera feed,” says Scott Gallaway, vice-president for government relations at SNC and a former US Army attack helicopter pilot.
Fiscal year 2027 budget documents suggest the army also plans to equip its developmental Bell MV-75 Cheyenne II tiltrotor with the DVEPS, with the MX Black Hawk serving as a testbed for the system. Bell has said the MV-75 will incorporate some optional features for unmanned flight.
SNC says DVEPS will support the broader development and testing of the UH-60MX, four of which Sikorsky plans to deliver to the US Army. These will be used to experiment with technologies and operational concepts for autonomous flight.
The DVEPS is already flying on the Sikorsky MH-60 variant Black Hawks operated by the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The system was developed jointly by US Special Operations Command and the army’s aviation programme office.
Sierra Nevada’s Degraded Visual Environment Pilotage System is already flying on the Sikorsky MH-60 Black Hawks operated by the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment Source: US Army
Gallaway says that simple electro-optical/infrared cameras are insufficient in many visually degraded environments, while radar struggles with the micro-levels of detail needed to precisely land a helicopter in low-light or adverse weather conditions.
“A helicopter’s own rotor wash can kick up a blinding cloud of sand or snow in the final seconds of landing, a hazard so persistent in combat operations that it has caused fatal accidents and driven the military to treat ‘brownout’ and ‘whiteout’ landings as a distinct engineering challenge rather than an edge case,” he says.
Safe autonomous flight, according to SNC, will depend on the real-time combining of multiple complementary sensors, including the precision of lidar, the penetrating ability of radar and the low-light performance of infrared.
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