Collective/Spline
From the original Sikorsky first flight press release:
Sikorsky chief pilot Bill Fell and co-pilot Kevin Bredenbeck completed three take-offs and landings during the hour-long sortie and evaluated the aircraft’s handling in all four cardinal directions at speeds up to 10kt.
“It was quite the aggressive first flight for a helicopter,” says Bredenbeck, who piloted the X2, the S-97’s proof-of-concept demonstrator.
I was mocking Sikorsky's own words about how doing ten knots was aggressive. They probably did nothing except hover over a point in a ten knot wind and do control inputs, standard but not aggressive. Typically it would be a couple of days to get to a respectable 60 knot-ish envelope to fine tune the FBW system which, with Sikorsky's
PR, would have been released. No fairings needed for that. Once fine tuned, fairings would be needed to push past the speeds of a 50 year old 53. That also would have resulted in a press release. I am sure they will make their 220 knot goal, but they are 4 months into their year long program. I grant that it took Bell over two months to expand the envelope of the 525 beyond 160 knots (near design speed) with a totally new privately funded FBW aircraft, but they at least waited to annouce something announcable, Adding fairings is like touching up paint if all you are doing is hovering.
The Sultan