Nick and Ct
SAS, you are correct re Nick being the first to bring up this aspect.
I was interested and did a calc on my own recently, using what I have seen posted re the increased hover Nr and what has been posted re V-22 blade area.
The paper that Tom MacDonald will be writing ought to answer all of the conjectures and will, I am certain, be very interesting reading.
This thread seems to have two separate subjects, one being the strategic/tactical financial justification for the machine, and the second being the flying quality acceptability with the VRS issue wrapped up into that second area.
I'll leave the first subject area to others, and make a simple observation regarding the second. The USMC discovered a serious problem in the Marana incident. The Bell/Boeing/USMC test team did what appears to be an extensive and technically rigorous flight test to establish the boundaries of the problem and establish corrective action procedures. They did that and the USMC and USAF aviators are now happy with what they fly.
There will inevitably be some comment that Marana represented a failure of that same test team to discover that particular problem. In response, my experience is that prior to flight test beginning on any new model, the entire test planning sequence is reviewed at many levels for rigor, completeness and of course adherence to contractual/specification requirements. What I am suggesting is that none of the experts involved saw this one coming, and along those lines, it is not the first time it has occurred within the industry.
Thanks,
John Dixson