60 FM wrote:
”As big a fan as I am of the platform, the Lockheed spokesman’s comment about the toughness of the H-60 seems pretty lame when you compare how the original Sikorsky team went after the UTAAS (and subsequent) contracts.
The best they can do is take cheap shots at the other companies, instead of being all in demonstrating why the product they are offering, (the product that *right now* can fill this role, unlike the other products on offer) should be chosen. ”
What the original Sikorsky team did was design and flight test a vehicle that met all the performance, crashworthiness, and ballistic vulnerability/survivability standards that were specified in detail by the US Army. We then “went after it” by incorporating fixes for development testing problems into the test aircraft* before the fly-off, and winning fly-off competition against the Boeing UTTAS design, and by the way, demonstrating a hover lift performance advantage of roughly 2000 lbs over the Boeing ship along the way on two separate instances.
*it was learned later that Boeing chose to propose solutions to their development problems in their production proposal, which of course they were free to do.
* A key difference therefore was that the Army had one competitor with a product that met specs and was production ready and another with a good deal of retesting ahead of them ( larger main and tail rotor, e.g. ).