Frank Piasecki is a real genius, and his twin rotor machines created the current Boeing Helo company. He is very smart and very funny - his daughter is a crackerjack engineer who helped a bit on the early LHX research projects.
However, Frank's "Pathfinder" was a re-treaded idea to add the pusher prop (instead of a tail rotor!) and get extra speed on a Hawk. He personally lobbied the local congressman, and got a bill passed to get several millions and an airframe, and then the Navy got saddled with the project. Dozens of press releases later, the program was taken over by the Army and then quietly smothered to death.
Winged compounds are not particularly new, are very well understood, carry much less payload over less range (but at somewhat higher speed) than a helicopter, and have never created a market for themselves. Each manufacturer has built real research compound helos, tried the concept and then dropped it.
Like the Notar, the Pathfinder is a testiment to the lack of technical understanding of the media, so that any idea is presented, unchallenged, in the
PR agent's own words.
Here is an artist's sketch of the Hawk Pathfinder, on Piasecki's web site. There seems to be no mention of the program at all on the site, butthere is a good biography of Frank:
http://www.piasecki.com/index.html