Let’s say their performance on what was, supposedly, the less technologically challenging design didn’t inspire confidence.
In what way? Up to this point, I had understood that Sikorsky had done a good job putting together an incremental step that could have done the job
https://www.defensenews.com/industry...d-in-40-years/
”
While Valor’s first flight was right on schedule in December 2017, Sikorsky and Boeing ran into several issues leading up to their expected first flight, delaying it by more than a year.
First, in early August 2017, Sikorsky’s Raider aircraft, essentially a smaller version of Defiant the company built and flew, crashed at its test flight facility in West Palm Beach, Florida. That left Sikorsky with one Raider aircraft to continue in its internal test program for refining its X2 coaxial helicopter technology for both the FLRAA program and the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft effort.
Then the company struggled to build
Defiant’s rotor blades due to manufacturing issues, causing a delay.The team had hoped to fly by the end of 2018, but while running the powertrain systems test bed, engineers
discovered a series of issues that caused them to hit pause on testing. Defiant eventually flew for the first time in March 2019.”…..