Sikorsky

Sikorsky Aircraft was founded in 1923 by the Russian-American aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky and has operated from Stratford, Connecticut, ever since. The company spent its early decades building seaplanes and pioneering practical rotary flight before becoming one of the dominant helicopter manufacturers of the second half of the twentieth century. It passed through United Aircraft and United Technologies before Lockheed Martin acquired it in November 2015, and it now operates as a Lockheed Martin subsidiary with Richard Benton as president.

The company’s current line still turns on the UH-60 Black Hawk family, in production in various forms since 1977 and used for troop transport, assault, medical evacuation and search-and-rescue by militaries worldwide. Alongside the Black Hawk, Sikorsky has pushed hard into autonomous rotary-wing flight. Its MATRIX autonomy system, developed over more than a decade of flight testing on an optionally piloted S-76, is now the backbone of several uncrewed programmes: the U-Hawk, an unpiloted Black Hawk variant marketed for cargo and casualty-evacuation missions in contested airspace, and the Nomad family of vertical-take-off uncrewed aerial systems. BETA Technologies has also licensed MATRIX to fly the MV250, a military adaptation of its Alia 250 hybrid-electric cargo aircraft.

In October 2026 Sikorsky unveiled the Nomad 100 Fast Pack, a four-aircraft kit packed into a standard six-metre shipping container with its own ground-control gear, power and comms. The company says the first two aircraft can be prepared for flight in under fifteen minutes, with the remaining pair taking four to six hours, and that the container is pitched at operators flying from ships or remote sites with no runway. Payload options cover reconnaissance, cargo delivery and strike. Crew sizes and delivery schedules have not been disclosed.

Export business continues alongside the autonomous work. In September 2026 the US State Department approved a roughly $140 million foreign military sale of four UH-60L Black Hawks and associated equipment to Argentina. Transfers to Ukraine have never been officially acknowledged, though Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) is reported to operate a small number of the aircraft. On 4 September 2026 Russian milbloggers claimed that an Alabuga-produced Geran-4 “Siker” long-range strike drone had destroyed a UH-60 at Zhulyany airfield in Kyiv, publishing footage of a fire on the apron; the Ukrainian side has not confirmed the loss, and independent corroboration of the specific airframe remains limited.

Sikorsky’s position in the field is distinctive for its scale and its parentage: it is the largest Western helicopter maker still building a mass military rotorcraft in series, now backed by a prime contractor’s reach, and it is applying that production base to the awkward middle ground between manned helicopters and small drones — large, long-endurance uncrewed rotorcraft that can lift useful payloads and operate from austere sites. Whether U-Hawk and Nomad translate into volume orders is the open question for the next few years.