Originally Posted by
The Sultan
What happened to the cruise speed of 170 Knots?
Good question. Based on my few flights in an E, it handled 170 smoothly. (Granted, we were without cargo) I am not sure why you compare speed of Osprey to the 53, as Osprey isn't a heavy lift bird. The 53K's big selling point is payload, not speed. One of Ospreys great virtues is speed (and we pay a pretty penny for it, per the never ending harangues in the Osprey threads ...)
While I am not sure if 141 is a milestone or is that the final spec/requirement, at the Sikorsky site they list the cruise speed as 141 knots. One wonders: Is that a design trade off that pays the bills for the substantial payload increase over the E?
We'll see.