By Alexander Soule

,Staff Writer

Oct 18, 2025

Years after testing a Black Hawk helicopter with no pilot, Sikorsky has unveiled the U-Hawk — a cargo drone that swaps out the cockpit for "clamshell" doors that swing wide to load cargo, and military personnel able to command missions from the ground using tablet devices.

Sikorsky has its headquarters in Stratford as a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, with an auxiliary factory in Bridgeport, where workers assemble Black Hawk airframes. Sikorsky exhibited a prototype U-Hawk at this week's Association of the United States Army expo in Washington, D.C. Test flights are planned for next year.

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The Trump administration has expressed support for rapid development of drone capabilities, on the heels of Ukraine's successes with inexpensive drones against Russian military targets.

"There is likely no single, silver bullet," said Army Lt. Gen. Robert Collins, speaking on the topic in May to members of the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. "It's imperative to keep pace with this."

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Jettisoning the cockpit increases the U-Hawk's cargo capacity 25% compared to a standard Black Hawk. The U-Hawk can carry four of the Joint Modular Intermodal Containers used by the military for cargo transport, double the number that can fit in the Black Hawk.

Sikorsky is also floating the concept of the U-Hawk functioning as a forward launch platform for drones in addition to cargo duties.

"By moving the cockpit out, it gives us a much longer cargo area," Ramsey Bentley told the trade publication War Zone in his role as Sikorsky's director of strategy and business development for advanced programs. "Each of these launched effects have multiple different payloads — so we could do a radio-frequency detection, we could do (electro-optical/infrared) capability, and then we also have a variety of kinetic payloads that could also go in."

The U-Hawk would not come cheap, with the Army spending $30.5 million on average for each Black Hawk coming off the Stratford production line currently.

The U-Hawk is one of two drones Sikorsky brought to the Association of the United States Army convention, along with the "blown wing" Nomad, which can take off vertically like a helicopter then fly like a plane for extended periods.

Bloomfield-based Kaman is also developing a small cargo drone for the U.S. Marine Corps that is configured like a helicopter.

Oct 18, 2025

Alexander Soule

Reporter

Alexander Soule is a staff writer with Hearst Connecticut Media focused on business, development and the Connecticut economy. Alex is a Maine native who served a two-year enlistment in the U.S. Army before attending Connecticut College. Before joining Hearst Connecticut, Alex started a growth economy website called Enterprise CT chronicling Connecticut startups, with previous work including the Fairfield County Business Journal, the Boston Business Journal, the Rochester Business Journal, Mass High Tech, InsuranceTimes and the MIT Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.