Bell has announced the retirement of the V-280 after it has demonstrated all
original FLRAA requirements in a three year/214 flight hour campaign. During this effort the aircraft demonstrated speeds 25+ knots above Bell's goal and 55+ knots above the original FLRAA goal. This compares to the SB-1 barely reaching a speed 20 knots below the original speed goal. As to other program goals the V-280 demonstrated those in flight testing on the actual aircraft while SB continues to promise future attempts to try to achieve in flight or pushing simulations as an acceptable alternative. Bell noted this in their end of testing press release with:
Ultimately, the Army doesn’t send warfighters into battle riding in the back of digital models and so we thought it was important to bring that physical proof.
This level of trolling will make it difficult for the Army to give SB any credit for not demonstrating something Bell was able to. Now that the SB-1 performance shortcomings have been bared for all to see, it time for asking why SB could not achieve the requirements even when they were given an extra 1 1/2 years to try to catch up. In this time SB was only able to accumulate around 15% of the V-280 flight time. One needs to ask: What are the concept or reliability issues with the ABC that make it unsafe to even test, let alone risk our warfighters in?