Reagan?
CC, now really! The Mt Hood to-do an example of VRS! As the Great Communicator might say: " There you go again". Not meant personally, of course, but the amount of misinformation promulgated in the wake of a few of the V-22 ooops events as regarding basic helicopters all being subject to VRS at the 40 kt/-800fpm boundary was simply unbelievable. Notice that one never caught the Project Pilot, Tom McDonald speaking thusly.
Anyhow, the Mt. Hood fiasco was a case of the pilot running the engines against the T4.5 limiter, drooping Nr, hence drooping tail rotor Nr as well. Rotor lift being a V squared function, the result was a descending right yaw spiral into the snow as the video showed. No mystery there.
It looks as though you at least are convinced that Bell now understands the shortcomings of the present TR design and has the answers as to how and why the Marana and Eglin events will be designed out of the next version. Have to say they have been really quiet about that aspect of things. And it is not simply a downwash velocity question alone, necessarily. When a few empty moments are available, do a hand calculation of the Marana blade loading number ( Ct/sigma ), allowing a reasonable addition for the increase required for the deceleration.
Not certain that I have read the JMR news correctly, but it appears that they want to have two competing prototypes, and I guess that means a fly-off. A very healthy and in the long run, a cost-effective way for the Army to know they have the right machine. The Army was quite thorough in the UTTAS fly-off, doing both an engineering and an operational comparison, using both their test pilots and a group of specially selected operational pilots ( including some with very little experience-on purpose ). Prior to the formal fly-off, there was a preliminary evaluation at Boeing and at Sikorsky, and that evaluation included power off landings ( not talking about power recoveries here ) for each of the three government pilots. Something else for the Bell TR folks to think about.
All of that in the future.
Thanks,
John