
How Skyryse Will Make Landing a Black Hawk Safer in Degraded Visual Environments

Justin is the Director of Business Development at Skyryse. He is a Military aviation subject matter expert with 21 years of experience, including duties as regimental flight lead in MH-60 series aircraft for 160th SOAR and an AH-64 Weapons and Tactics instructor, serving as a standardizations instructor pilot and aviation mission survivability officer in both platforms.
January 22, 2025
Read MoreAmerica’s entrance into the global war on terror forced U.S. military helicopter pilots to regularly operate in a desert environment that posed a unique challenge to visibility while landing. These dangerous landings in sandy, degraded conditions became so infamous throughout military aviation culture that they inspired a simple colloquial that perfectly describes them – “brown out landings.”

Any pilot that’s experienced their first true brown out landing in a helicopter knows just how helpless it can feel to see the ground and sky suddenly disappear in a cloud of brown dust so thick that visibility drops to zero. Similarly, any pilot who’s experienced it knows just how monumental it is to successfully complete the landing. The frequent necessity to execute this task at night compounds this challenge, further restricting a pilot's field of view, visual acuity, and depth perception. During actual combat operations there are often multiple helicopters landing in very close proximity to each other during these difficult zero visibility landings. This not only increases the risk of contact with the ground in an undesired profile, it increases the risk of collision with the other aircraft.
Training towards this task consumes significant focus – at the cost of both time and money – often becoming the primary focus of a rotary wing aviation unit's training plan prior to a deployment. Even with this large investment in training, most units never reached full operational capability for all of their aviators. The current solution in military aviation is to add complex systems to an already congested cockpit in an attempt to aid these landings but this will not solve the problem, the answer is SkyOS.
The understanding of the problem was first confronted due to a hard and unfortunate lesson experienced by America more than 20 years earlier. On April 24, 1980, the United States launched a daring long-range raid into Iran with the goal of rescuing fifty-two U.S. hostages. Operation Eagle Claw became a seminal event due to the catastrophic operational failure that resulted in the mission being aborted with no hostages recovered. The operation involved both fixed and rotary wing aviation assets as well as special operations ground forces working jointly to provide America's best tactical option for execution. Although the aircraft being used had the range, speed, and payload required to get to the target and get back home, the operation failed due to a crash at the forward refueling point in Iran. During an attempt to reposition for refuel, a transport helicopter hit a parked fixed wing refuel aircraft. The helicopter's weight and subsequent rotor downwash caused significantly reduced visibility in an extremely dusty environment. This failure resulted in the formation of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and other supporting units, with the goal of avoiding similar failures in the future. The reimagining of tactics included the ability to control a helicopter in a degraded visual environment, yet that environment still causes challenges and mishaps today for even the most proficient helicopter pilot.

The environmental challenges helicopters face don’t and won’t change, but the fundamental way we control a helicopter can. SkyOS, Skyryse’s universal flight operating system, could have made that mission successful by simplifying the pilot’s control of the aircraft in the most critical phases of flight.
America’s Department of Defense rotary wing fleet attempted to address the challenge during the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, making significant progress in a short amount of time by addressing issues in training and standardization to mitigate the increased risk. Leaders and trainers aggressively developed tactics that enabled missions to continue at the pace required to fight and win despite this demanding environment. Unfortunately the U.S. military gained experience but it came with a significant amount of aircraft damage and, more tragically, loss of human life, based solely on the difficult operating environment as well as controls for the helicopter which dates back to Igor Sikorsky.
Now that conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down, the U.S. military risks repeating the tragic lessons of the past with a less experienced pilot corps being asked to perform in even more complex battlespaces. As we look at ongoing large scale conflicts around the world, we see that our future fight will add more complexity and challenges to the battlefield, and simply mastering the environment won’t be sufficient. SkyOS is the asymmetrical advantage needed to account for increased battlefield complexity, allowing future aviators and ground operators to concentrate on the enemy and mission, instead of cumbersome cockpit systems and antiquated controls.
Fundamentally, military helicopter control logic hasn't changed since its inception. While strides have been made to reduce pilot workload in certain situations, there hasn't been a holistic effort to address the root cause of the issue – simplified aircraft control maximizing the pilot agency through a streamlined Human Machine Interface (HMI). Undoubtedly, making an aircraft easier to control in all situations makes the aviator more effective and efficient. We can honor the bravery, ingenuity, and skill of the men and women that consistently operated in this environment for decades, but we should make it safer for them on the future battlefield.
Skyryse makes aviation safer by fundamentally changing the way a pilot controls and interfaces with helicopters. SkyOS leverages modern technology to make the pilot more effective and safe in every environment. SkyOS focuses on the human machine interface, as opposed to eliminating the pilot from the equation. We believe that by blending the dynamic and adaptive decision making of the human operator with the repeatable precision of deterministic AI, we fuse together the best of human and machine attributes. Our technology unlocks the true performance potential of both the machine and human, allowing pilots to become battle managers and decision makers through a groundbreaking reduction of unnecessary and needless workload, while allowing helicopters to operate at maximum performance capabilities without exceeding limitations. SkyOS offers the ability to command a helicopter to land in the worst brownout conditions safely with the push of a button. Skyryse is fielding the technology which allows aviators to maintain complete situational awareness even in the worst environments, allowing them to serve as true aviation battle managers. Imagine a system that allows you to react to enemy fire as required, while maintaining a dynamic safe flight envelope that adapts to current performance conditions of the environment and aircraft. SkyOS stands ready to deliver this capability to the warfighter, offering a safer and more survivable way of executing missions.
While the environment always gets a vote, our mission is to give the warfighter the winning advantage, not placing pilots at a disadvantage by flying outdated technology and antiquated controls. Skyryse technology can help make our warriors safer; the more demanding the mission, the more our technology shines.