I said, "As even the dumbest helicopter pilot knows..."
20th Century replied:
Wow, and we are fortunate enough to have you right here on PPRuNe with us to provide commentary. Aren't we lucky...
Hey, you don't even thank me when I toss you the easy ones? Sheesh.
jeffg:
Yet another strawman argument from FH. No FH, a trained V-22 pilot would roll the nacelles forward and use longitudinal stick as he is trained to do.
Ah Jeff...so ill-informed. Are you even a pilot?
Of course I know of the dangers of the dreaded turn-to-final-stall-spin. I fly airplanes, you know. But we do not use airplanes for combat insertions and the things that the V-22 will be doing. We use helicopters for those missions.
Jeff, your assertion that a trained V-22 pilot will "simply" roll the nacelles forward is so incredibly...galactically naive that it defies comprehension. Do you honestly believe that a V-22 pilot on (perhaps downwind) short-short final to an LZ...a pilot who is possibly being shot at and has a bunch of other things going on and is friggin' BUSY is going to be able to recognize incipient A-VRS and react in time by calmly beeping the nacelles forward, aborting the approach and flying away? Get outta here. Obviously you've never flown a helicopter in your life. Because if you had, you'd know that this V-22 pilot we're talking about is going to crash.
Inverted.
Killing everyone onboard.
Like happened in Marana.
And it'll be "Pilot Error."
I suspect that, deep down you know this but you don't want to admit it because you (and the other tiltrotor advocates) want SO BADLY for the V-22 to be a success. Well...sorry. A-VRS *is* the fatal flaw in the V-22 ("Fatal Flaw" being the working title of my book on the bird.) All the wishful thinking in the world will not make this problem go away.
I know the V-22 does some things that conventional helicopters or airplanes cannot. I know that the pilots who fly it are passionate about it. (Hey, one of the Air Force geeks on this forum is so "passionate" that he even went to far as to threaten my life for criticizing it! No lie. You'll notice that he does not post on here anymore.) I know that there are people who see the tiltrotor as an "advancement" of technology and who desperately want the V-22 to work. The trouble is, it's a defective design from the get-go.
Here's what's
going to happen: V-22 procurement will end. Done. Over time, attrition (e.g. crashes) will whittle the fleet down to the point that they'll all be retired. (Probably around the same time the country decides that we don't need FOUR separate-but-overlapping branches of the military. But that's another discussion.) It'll be the government's way of admitting that they shoved this dangerous piece of junk down our collective throats for the economic good of the communities and companies that benefit by building it.
I just hope this happens before too many more of our pilots and soldiers are killed.