PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Sikorsky + Boeing pitch ‘X-2’-based design for US Army JMR TD effort
Old 3rd Aug 2014, 23:12
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riff_raff
 
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It will be good if award would allow the combination of the features to be employed, eg, Bell non-tilting engine with Karem's variable speed, or AVX's configuration with Boeing-Sikorsky's rigid rotors.
Based on what the Army has stated publicly I'd guess that all four competitors will get some amount of funding. But I'm pretty sure only Sikorsky and Bell will get contracts for flight demonstrators. This is a very high-profile development program for the Army, and I can't imagine them being willing to risk one of the flight demonstrator contracts on small companies like Karem and AVX that have limited resources and no track record managing projects of this scale.

I agree with you that the rotor systems proposed by AVX and Karem appear to provide some worthwhile performance benefits. But these rotor systems will also likely add cost. One thing I liked about the Bell concept was that they made an effort to reduce cost (ie. the single piece straight wing, non-tilting engines, etc). The Army does not want a repeat of the massive budget overruns and schedule delays that become common with all aircraft programs.The US defense budget is rapidly shrinking and funding for development programs is one of the first things to get cut.
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