Good luck with the first flight of X2, Chief Test Pilot K. Bredenbeck.
Thanks for the pictures Chopper2004, it looked like a great event.
IFMU, i think that was very much the concern for the JHL contract. V-22 represents many 1000s of man-hours investment. To simply pull the plug on tilt-rotor would leave a lot of folks very annoyed. Sikorsky have taken a very sensible approach and developed X2, in the same way that Bell originally developed
XV-3 and
XV-15, as a technology demonstator aircraft.
In the long run, i believe that X2 represents the next generation of helicopter development. The fact that the engineering numbers describe a machine with good payload-range performance means that there is great commercial potential. I wish Sikorsky luck because i would like to see the potential realised.