Originally Posted by
The Sultan
Defiant X article.
https://verticalmag.com/news/defiant...ce-black-hawk/
From the article:
While this may just be the article's author cherry picking past articles it confirms that SB has not released any updated information since June 2020. This seems to confirm no progress or flights (?) in six months. So what is wrong. If it was just drag keeping the top speed low they could have flown it to expand the GW/CG and ALT/TEMP envelopes which would gather meaningful data for any proposal and padded the flight hours to look less than the pathetically low 26 hours. I believe the demo was suppose to be at least 100 flight hours with the 280 demo ship good for at least a 200 flight hour campaign.. Giving up in doing anything since June when they needed to make substantial progress to even be a dark horse alternative to the 280 if Bell stumbled (which the Bell team didn't) points to a flight safety issue (or issues) that could not be overcome. Many have speculated high vibration, but in my experience pilot bonus money overcomes that issue. So we are looking at loads so high that catastrophic failure within a limited number of flights could occur or a danger the rotors could collide like what was already demonstrated on the S-97. It will be interesting to find out what metaphorically killed the SB-1 prototype.
Looking back at this thread, there were some flights between summer (20 hrs) and October (23 hrs), and a few more at the December (26 hrs) articles. None in Jan so far. So it’s not quite as bad as “Giving up in doing anything since June” but definitely as sign that something isn’t well. We can all speculate, but there are several likely issues, some of which you’ve identified. In any case, it’s ballsy to ask the USG for billions to develop a production aircraft based on two demonstrators that, if we’re being honest, haven’t met their design goals. There is something wrong with the aircraft concept, the design execution, or both.
As for Defiant-X, the RAH-66 exhaust is interesting... that’s a lot of mass flow in some long ducts. The hubs looks radically smaller than on SB>1, though their success in sweet talking the Army down on speed would allow for lower hub loads and smaller structure. Or it’s just fanciful artwork.