Originally Posted by
etudiant
Sadly I think this take is very much on the money.
The Army does not have any coherent vision of what the next conflict may look like, so they chose to raise the bar on some well recognized aircraft performance metrics, even though these are militarily irrelevant.
Other less visible parameters, such as hours of maintenance per flight hour, even though more relevant, seem to have been ignored entirely.
I expect the entire effort to be cancelled, joining a long list of aborted Army development efforts.
Based on this logic, the US Army should have stayed with the Huey like the US Marines.
The Bell (independent of Boeing) V-280 Valor is not a V-22 when it comes to cost per flight hour. The V-280 is based on Bell developed commercial aircraft technology, not 40 year old V-22 military technology. Commercial customers care a lot more about cost per flight hour than the military.