Vice President & General Manager Sikorsky Aircraft Education: Bachelor’s degree in business administration, University of Florida; MBA, University of Florida
The Stratford helicopter maker secured a $10.9 billion contract for up to 99 CH-53K helicopters in September 2025, guaranteeing work through 2033, but now faces the challenge of scaling production to meet demand.
“I’m actually second-generation Lockheed,” Rich Benton says with some pride.
His father, Rich Benton Sr., began his career working for aviation company Martin Marietta — the business that merged with Lockheed Corp. to form Lockheed Martin in 1995.
Rich Jr. started out as a financial analyst for the company in 1997.
“So, I would say to some extent I was built for this from the very beginning, because this is all I ever knew,” he said.
Benton took over as vice president and general manager at Sikorsky in June 2024, replacing Paul Lemmo at an interesting period for the Stratford-based helicopter maker.
At the time, the company was pursuing a multiyear, multibillion-dollar contract to build CH-53K heavy-lift helicopters for the U.S. Marine Corps. It had also recently lost a bid to produce a replacement for its own Black Hawk, the military’s workhorse utility helicopter since the mid-1970s.
That contract went to rival Bell Helicopter.
“So yeah, interesting time in the business,” Benton said. “And I think my priorities then are actually the same as my priorities today. In any business, it’s performing on the work you have, right?”
That approach paid off about 15 months later, in September 2025, when Sikorsky announced it had secured the CH-53K deal — a $10.9 billion multiyear contract covering up to 99 aircraft — which the company said will guarantee work at its Stratford facility through 2033.
The contract also supports about 42 Connecticut-based supply-chain companies.
At the time, Benton described the win to the Hartford Business Journal as “monumental.”
But of course, any new contract brings with it the bigger challenge of execution, something Benton says he’s focused on for 2026. Sikorsky’s Stratford facility has been working on CH-53K helicopters for more than a decade during the program’s development and early deliveries, but the multiyear contract will require scaling up production to 16 to 22 aircraft annually, along with maintenance work on helicopters already in service.
“We’ve been planning for this ramp for several years,” Benton said. “Now it really is about continuing to execute the ramp we’ve been on and delivering that capability at scale.”
In the third quarter of 2025, Lockheed Martin lowered the sales forecast for its rotor and mission systems division by $500 million due to slower-than-expected production at Sikorsky.
Lockheed Chief Financial Officer Evan Scott said the CH-53K heavy-lift helicopter program provided most of the issues in terms of delays, assuring analysts that production would be scaled and in “good shape” in 2026.
For Benton, the primary challenge in preparing for that ramp-up is the supply chain, which he described as the most unpredictable part of the process. He said the company is working to strengthen resilience among key suppliers and identify alternative sources in order to reduce single points of failure.
‘Large, complex business’
Although he has spent his entire career with one corporation, Benton said that in more than 25 years with Lockheed he has gained a wide range of experience across the contractor’s complex programs.
He previously served as vice president of the Javelin joint venture, a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missile Systems, and led program management for the HELLFIRE missile, Joint Air-to-Ground Missile, M299 launcher and related systems.
Benton has also held senior roles overseeing combat systems strategy and execution across domestic and international portfolios. His experience includes leadership positions in program management, global supply chain operations, international capture and mergers and acquisitions.
While at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, Benton led efforts to develop and deploy digital and business transformation tools that moved the unit toward model-based design, an approach that relies on digital models to design, test and manage complex systems.
Before moving to Sikorsky, Benton most recently served as vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Training and Logistics Solutions division.
“This is a very large, complex business with a very diverse customer set, and I like to think of everything I did prior to this was to prepare me for this role,” Benton said. “When I think about the totality of that career — development, production sustainment, mergers, acquisitions, there is an element of every one of those things here at Sikorsky.”
Cranes lift a 12,000-pound gearbox into a CH-53K heavy-lift helicopter on Sikorsky’s final assembly line in Stratford. Contributed Photo
Although he has had many roles, Benton has always been based in his home state of Florida. Sikorsky is his first venture outside the Sunshine State. He says since he took up the role, he’s enjoyed staying connected to the work on the shop floor in Stratford.
“In my mind, it is the most amazing factory I ever worked at, at Lockheed Martin,” he said. “I like to think of it as 2.2 million square feet of manufacturing awesomeness.”
R&D operations
Supporting Sikorsky’s Stratford production line is a significant amount of experimentation and research aimed at advancing vertical-lift technology.
Key initiatives include autonomous flight, electrification and new aircraft configurations that can take off and land vertically like helicopters while cruising on fixed wings like airplanes.
Just in the last few months, Sikorsky engineers converted a Black Hawk helicopter into what the company calls a U-Hawk — an autonomous, unmanned aircraft system with about 25% more cargo capacity than a standard Black Hawk. The conversion replaced the cockpit with clamshell doors and a rear ramp, and substituted traditional flight controls with a fly-by-wire system integrated with Sikorsky’s MATRIX autonomy technology.
The company has also unveiled its Nomad future family of aircraft, designed to take off, hover and land vertically while cruising on wings for longer-range missions. Nomad aircraft are operated using MATRIX autonomy and rely primarily on hybrid-electric propulsion.
These projects are aimed at serving the U.S. military’s Future Vertical Lift (FVL) initiative — a 20-year quest to develop the next generation of vertical-lift aircraft. One of the program’s goals, Benton said, is to introduce greater flexibility into legacy aircraft programs that have long anchored the more-than-century-old company.
But rivals are also in the hunt for the Future Vertical Lift program — and Bell’s win for the Black Hawk replacement showed that some are nipping at Sikorsky’s heels.
Bell’s MV-75 is a tiltrotor aircraft that first flew in 2017. The production model is expected to be in flight testing in 2026, with first deployment slated for 2030. Bell has said it can cruise at twice the speed of a Black Hawk.
Benton is philosophical about the loss of the replacement contract.
“We continue to invest to modernize the Black Hawk,” he said. “It still has a very bright future.”
Benton said the Army plans to keep the Black Hawk in its inventory potentially through 2070, and Sikorsky recently received a $43 million contract to re-engineer aspects of the aircraft.
The U-Hawk initiative is one example of how the legacy Black Hawk program is being modernized, including options for unmanned and autonomous flight. Another is the development of so-called “launched effects,” small autonomous drones that could be deployed by a Black Hawk crew to create a coordinated “swarm” during combat operations.
Alongside the military programs, Sikorsky also has an important roster of commercial customers, including fire departments. The company’s S70i Firehawk played a significant role in fighting California’s recent devastating wildfires, and Sikorsky is partnering with the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to apply more of its autonomous technology to the aircraft.
Meanwhile, the company is also expanding the market for its S92 helicopter, which is traditionally used in the offshore oil and gas industry. Benton says the aircraft is increasingly in demand for VIPs and heads of state.
Benton said expanding the use of artificial intelligence will be another priority in 2026, supported by Lockheed Martin’s AI center in nearby Shelton. He said the company is using AI-driven tools to sift through vast amounts of data, identify the most relevant information and speed decision-making.
AI is already being used on the shop floor to accelerate production and improve aircraft maintenance, helping extend the service life of Sikorsky aircraft while reducing costs.
Benton said he’s optimistic about Sikorsky’s prospects in the coming year and the pace of change underway at the company.
“We’re accelerating the pace that we’re innovating and deploying things, taking it from decades down to years,” he said.
