The new kit features external wings able to carry a range of armaments, including gun pods, precision missiles and the low-cost guided rockets that have emerged as a popular choice for countering one-way attack drones.
Rotorcraft manufacturer Sikorsky has unveiled a new modular weapons kit for the company’s widely used UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopter.
Revealed at the 2026 Army Aviation Association of America conference in Nashville on 15 April, the Armed Black Hawk package allows a standard UH-60M to expand its capabilities with air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons, while maintaining the traditional troop carrying and logistics support roles of the medium-lift helicopter.
Each Armed Black Hawk kit includes two wings mounted forward and above the UH-60’s two side-opening troop doors. The wings feature two weapons stations each, which can accommodate the GP19 .50 calibre gun pod, precision strike weapons like Lockheed Martin’s AGM-179 Joint Air-to-Ground Missile and launchers for BAE Systems APKWS II guided rockets.
Those low-cost rockets have emerged as a popular option for countering the threat posed by swarms of cheap, long-range one-way attack drones developed by Iran and Russia.
An electro-optical infrared sensor will be added below the nose of each Black Hawk to offer pilots a way to laser-designate guided munitions.
Each Armed Black Hawk kit also includes the UH-60M’s two standard machine gun stations located forward of the troop doors. The new configuration offers the option of replacing the standard crew-served weapons with barreled M134D miniguns mounted in a fixed-forward position and controlled by the pilots.
“The new Armed Black Hawk kits give warfighters one aircraft that can do it all,” says Sikorsky general manager Rich Benton.
The armament kit, he adds, is commercially available and able to be swapped out by frontline operators in approximately 3h. Two configurations are available, one geared for close-in weapons support and the other designed for longer range precision strike.
Direct commercial sales of the armament kits are being offered through Sikorsky subsidiary PZL Mielec in Poland. Sikorsky parent company Lockheed Martin will also offer the Armed Black Hawk via the the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales system.
The idea of converting Black Hawks into gunships is not new. In the 2010s the company promoted a similar concept, securing sales for weaponized versions.
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