MBSE in Action: How STC and Bell are Transforming U.S. Army Aviation
Company: Bell Textron
Headquarters: Fort Worth, Texas
Industry: Aerospace manufacturer
STC Services Utilized: MBSE services, digital engineering consulting services, software and infrastructure support
INTRODUCTION
In 2022, Bell Textron Inc. (Bell), a Textron Inc. company, was in the final stages of competing for the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) contract. FLRAA—now designated the MV-75—is the Army’s next-generation assault aircraft intended to augment the UH-60 Black Hawk and is one of the Army’s early digital-first pathfinder programs. Under Title 10 U.S.C. 4401, major defense acquisition programs are required to align with Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) principles, enabling long-term platform resiliency and delivering incremental, rapid capability upgrades.
In the final stages of the competition, Bell was one of two remaining offerors, competing against another experienced aircraft developer. Given the program’s stringent model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and digital engineering (DE) requirements, Bell recognized the importance of strengthening its model-based architectural posture and ensuring its proposed solution clearly demonstrated alignment with the Army’s objectives.
Bell engaged Strategic Technology Consulting (STC), a wholly owned subsidiary of Arcfield, for rapid, high-assurance model-based engineering support. With only weeks remaining until the proposal submission deadline, STC worked alongside Bell engineers to apply MBSE techniques to demonstrate how their proposed system design would meet the Army’s MOSA-aligned approach—a key factor in securing
the FLRAA contract.
MOSA and MBSE, however, are more than just government requirements—they are increasingly central to how the Department of War pursues adaptability, competition and rapid capability insertion across major acquisition programs. An intentional, digital-first approach proved to be a critical differentiator in Bell’s proposal, highlighting the strategic value of STC’s support.
HOW DOES MBSE ENABLE MOSA? MBSE enables MOSA by aligning how systems are specified and designed with how they are structured and integrated for modularity. MBSE provides the formalized modeling framework to design, manage and validate cohesive and severable systems, while MOSA provides the architecture and design strategy that drives flexibility, reuse and interoperability within system design. When used together, they accelerate innovation, foster flexibility and lower long-term program costs. |
THE CHALLENGE
As Bell approached final FLRAA proposal submission, the team faced a compressed timeline to demonstrate a sophisticated DE approach that satisfied the Army’s MOSA expectations for major defense acquisition programs. MOSA is intended to enable incremental development and strengthen competition, innovation and interoperability, and Bell’s proposal needed to proactively demonstrate how these outcomes were enabled by the design approach.
This challenge was compounded by the scale and velocity of modeling activity across the program. As the FLRAA effort generated massive volumes of rapidly evolving model data across multiple teams, managing this information required advanced tools, custom plugins and automation to properly capture, aggregate and synthesize data across the MV-75 FLRAA program’s interconnected models—while maintaining quality, consistency and end-to-end traceability throughout the model ecosystem.
Bell collaborated with STC for specialized MBSE expertise, leveraging their proven methods for complex defense programs. This collaboration focused on rapidly delivering high-confidence model artifacts with robust traceability under significant time constraints, supporting Bell in submitting a credible, evidence-backed DE approach aligned with Army’s next-generation modernization requirements.
STC'S SUPPORT AND IMPACT
Today, STC supports Bell in three key areas:
COLLABORATION BETWEEN DESIGN AND INTEGRATION TEAMS
Integrated product teams (IPT) are responsible for design and development of individual subsystems that make up MV-75 FLRAA, while the systems engineering team integrates each subsystem into one coherent weapons system. STC has become an embedded member of each team, updating existing workstreams and ensuring all technical data is captured in coherent, well-formed digital models to maintain consistency and completeness across weapons system designs. With more than 600 Bell engineers actively working with the models, STC provides ongoing MBSE support to ensure both teams can seamlessly work together to deliver MV-75 FLRAA.
DIGITAL MODEL OPERATIONS AND GOVERNANCE
The FLRAA digital model contains several million model elements spread across many model projects, generating an enormous amount of design information that must be captured, maintained and updated. Prior to STC’s involvement, updating project usages across all models was a manual effort, demanding critical engineer time to execute. STC developed a custom model management plugin to schedule and automate project usage updates on a weekly basis, reducing hands-on time by 90%, from 50 hours to five hours. This ensures all MV-75 FLRAA digital model design data is synchronized to authoritative model versions, maintaining configuration control across engineering teams. To date, STC has developed more than 200 validation rules to automate model checking and ensure model consistency and completeness as defined by Bell and government modeling standards. These rules act as a real-time ‘safety net’ within the model, automatically flagging compliance gaps before design reviews and preventing errors that traditionally could surface months later in integration or testing.
ENSURING SUBSYSTEMS COMPLY WITH RELEVANT REGULATORY AND INDUSTRY REQUIREMENTS
Prior to implementing MBSE, specialty engineering teams primarily relied on document-based practices to interface with the systems engineering team. By supporting updates to Bell’s workstreams to capture the system design in a model-based format, STC helped Bell create a digital thread connecting the system architecture model and analysis tools. This enables teams to better understand how safety decisions impact overall system design and what impacts system design decisions have on safety and airworthiness analysis.
BY THE NUMBERS SCALE 600+ Bell engineers actively working in and editing MV-75 FLRAA system architecture models 6 MILLION+ model elements spread across 500+ model projects 90% reduction in hands-on time needed to update project usages 200+ custom validation rules automatically verify system architecture requirements These results translate directly to program performance—reducing rework cycles, accelerating review readiness and strengthening the Army’s confidence in Bell’s digital design maturity. |
“STC’s expertise in MBSE has help make the FLRAA weapon system program a successful DE pathfinder for the US Army. The scale of FLRAA’s system model challenges not only tool mechanics but also approaches for what and how to model. STC has provided critical support leveraging Cameo at scale, optimizing model access for the Army, techniques for modeling architecture and design, and the day-to-day work of creating the system model itself.”- Galen Valentine, FLRAA Chief Architect |
CONCLUSION
STC’s relationship with Bell has transformed since the early days of the MV-75 FLRAA program. What began as specialized MBSE consulting has transformed into critical embedded support for Bell’s team, delivering expertise across a broad spectrum of systems engineering activities. This includes helping Bell effectively manage and integrate digital models within the MV-75 FLRAA system. STC supports model collaboration and works challenges in real-time during model development to ensure the program continues to meet the Army’s rigorous requirements throughout the development process.
STC engineers continue to work side by side with Bell’s IPT engineers. This embedded model ensures MBSE best practices aren’t just documented—they’re lived, enabling Bell’s workforce to internalize DE as a core competency. The success of the FLRAA collaboration underscores a larger truth: model-based transformation isn’t about technology alone—it’s about people, process and purpose. STC’s approach to DE blends technical mastery with the mission-driven mindset required to deliver enduring overmatch for the U.S. Army and industry.
This material is based upon work supported by the Army Contracting Command - Redstone Arsenal under Contract No. W58RGZ-23-C-0001. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Army Contracting Command - Redstone Arsenal.
“STC started with Bell during FLRAA’s early model development. Their effort has been pivotal in building a high-quality large-scale model. Their agility, adaptability, and scalability have helped us to move at the pace of our customer thus accelerating program development.”- Ryan Ehinger, Senior Vice President and Program Director, FLRAA, Bell |
ABOUT BELL
Bell is an aerospace and defense company that engineers and manufactures aircraft for critical solutions in extreme scenarios. The company breaks barriers in lifting people to safety across transportation, medical, rescue, and military services and is leading the industry in fast, reliable, and efficient future solutions.
Visit bellflight.com for more details.
ABOUT STC
STC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Arcfield, is a sophisticated systems engineering services company, leveraging advanced digital tools and practices to more effectively and efficiently design and field sustainable and reliable systems. Our team utilizes industry-leading and revolutionary methods, languages and tools to specify, design and test the largest, most complex systems in the world.
Visit stc.arcfield.com for more details.
