Hello, ZD:
The 1976 fly-off competition between Boeing and Sikorsky took place in several places.
The operational evaluation started at Ft Rucker Alabama and was completed at Ft Campbell.
The Army assigned 10 pilots to Boeing and 10 to Sikorsky. They were selected to represent the wide spread of background and experience that reflected the Army pilots who would be flying the winner.
We instructed the 10 pilots who would fly the Sikorsky UTTAS ( what the aircraft was called at that stage ) according to a syllabus that I had written. They got one flight at empty weight and the rest was either at design gross weight ( 16,400 lbs at the time ) or alternate gross weight ( 19,900 lbs at the time ), and external load of 7000 lbs. Syllabus included all the AFCS/SAS failures, OEI failures etc.
We signed them all off at the 10 hour point and from then on, they flew the evaluation by themselves. There were no pilot error issues during their operational evaluation flights at either location.
(To my knowledge, Boeing did something quite similar )