I hope it's a long winter
FH your argument is devoid of facts.
Your assumption that a stall in a fixed wing aircraft is announced as opposed to VRS being unannounced in a Tiltrotor is false. The V-22 and the AW609 both have visual and aural VRS warning indications.
Your assertion that VRS is ‘UNPREDICTABLE’ is also false. If you take the time to read the many good papers available through AHS and other societies you’ll find that VRS is very predictable. From those papers you’ll find the data of both Tiltrotor aligns very nicely allowing for accurate predictions to be made and limits set. This isn’t theoretical data, its data from actual flight test with roll off events. What is also known is that to get into VRS you have to exceed the flight manual limit by a minimum of 100%.
You also over simplify a fixed wing stall recovery. NASA, NTSB and the FAA all tell us that in the fixed wing world LOC is the largest cause of fatal mishaps. Depending on operation stalls make up 25-40% of LOC mishaps. If the recovery technique is so simple why is it the leading cause of fatalities in the fixed wing world? In your straw man you have the poor Tiltrotor pilot “really busy at the bottom of a screwed-up approach” but in your fixed wing argument the pilots are ‘numbnuts’ if they get into a stall. Reality is that many landing mishaps no matter what type of aircraft are a result of pilots getting “really busy at the bottom of a screwed-up approach”. The facts are that recovery from a stall isn’t always so simple. The wrong control input, i.e. instinctively adding aileron in an asymmetrical stall can result in the aircraft entering an unrecoverable spin when close to the ground, just as you assert that adding the wrong input will cause the Tiltrotor to roll over. The Tiltrotor requires one simple movement, thumb forward. As long as the nacelles are moved it doesn’t matter what the pilot does with the other controls. You would argue that the Tiltrotor pilot will get confused and make the wrong input. Maybe, but that holds true for every airframe does it not?
What is the biggest recommendation for avoiding a stall? Training and recognition. When I went through my Citation initial type rating every session we focused on stall recovery and recognition, clean stalls, dirty stalls, and approach turn stalls, etc. When I go for recurrent what do we focus on? Stall recovery and recognition. Why? So that the recovery is instinctual and immediate because stalls have been identified as a risk. The same is true of Tiltrotor training and VRS. VRS will be trained to just as stalls are and the pilot’s ability to react correctly will be no different than for a stall. The truth is that fixed wing aircraft fly much closer to the stall boundary (<10-20% margin depending on type) than a Tiltrotor does to the VRS boundary (>100% margin for all Tiltrotors).
“When a tilt-rotor on short-final gets into A-VRS and rolls over on its back you can cancel Christmas: Everyone onboard is going to die. With basically no warning“.
Same is true of a fixed wing stall close to the ground. So what’s the point? The same agencies mentioned above also found that most fixed wing stalls happen below pattern altitude with the majority happening below 250 ft AGL, not much chance of a recovery from that is there?