Originally Posted by
60FltMech
Having said that, New stuff is hard, and Bell has demonstrated something new and it will be, IF it can do everything it claims, a great advancement for Army Aviation and the Air Assault doctrine. That’s a fact. And as cynical as I am, and as hard as it is to say given the track record of the various services over the years, I think that not everyone involved in the flight evaluation of these competitors is a corrupt sellout. A lot of these issues that we are discussing here have been heavily evaluated by fellow aviators with pretty impressive professional experience.
It’s worth noting that tiltrotors as a concept aren’t new and the production V-280 would be following in the footsteps of the V-280 Tech Demonstrator, TR918 Deepwater UAV, 609 civil tiltrotor, TR911X Eagle Eye UAV, V-22 Osprey, XV-15, and the XV-3. That’s 70 years of tiltrotor research and products by Bell, usually in collaboration with NASA or one of the military services. The basics of “how to design, operate, and fly a tiltrotor” are well established. As you highlighted, I think the bigger risks are schedule and budget related, not technical.