Ahh, that would be me!
And wasn't it also jeffg who said:
And don't forget that IF it gets certified , and IF it can cruise at 125kn , if it is delivered for $1.075m .....then you WILL eat your hat !!
Well, let's see. It did get its FAA certification...supposedly. But is it actually certified? I can't seem to find anything on the faa.gov website about it, and there is certainly no new TCDS in their database. So I'm not sure why Bell made the Big Announcement. Did they jump the gun?
But okay, if it did actually get US certification then I am truly surprised. As I've said, I didn't think they'd do it considering that they bailed on Louisiana as a manufacturing base for it.
Still, certification by itself doesn't mean much. Just ask Beechcraft (Starship) or Cessna (162) or any of the other manufacturers who've pushed a design through to certification only to see the thing fail in one way or the other. But it appears that I might have to concede to jeffg on the first point.
But...! Does it cruise at 125 knots? Knot hardly. Objective pilot reports that have been published put the cruise speed around 110-115 knots, which is right in line with an L-4 on low-skids. The reporters report ride-quality issues above that point, which is just what one would expect with an L-model rotor system. But hey, what's ten or fifteen knots among friends, right? So all the dreamers were off by *only* ten or fifteen knots, so what? Well, a lot of the fanboys really hung their hat on that "125 knot" cruise speed. Oh well.
#3. $1.075 million? Hah. What are they saying now, $1.2? Is it possible to actually get one in fly-away condition for $1.075?
I'm still waiting for some other real real numbers. What are the actual basic operating empty weights? What is the actual fuel burn and endurance with that paltry 88 gallon capacity?
As I predicted, the horizontal stab did move. You just wait: Endplates/winglets are next.
So without backtracking or crawfishing, I'll hold off on the hat-eating for just a bit. I'll still do it...but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
Curiously, I had a guy...I'm not sure exactly what he does or who he works for, but he must read forums such as these, and he seems to be pretty high up in one of the major manufacturers (won't say which). He offered to buy me lunch! He said that if I were to go to the last Heli-Something that he would provide a hat which I could munch on for photo-op and publicity purposes. He also told me some proprietary things about the 505, and some things about the 525 fatal that haven't yet been disclosed to the public. Which is odd - I must have a face that people like telling things to (I wish they wouldn't). Maybe he made the the stuff up, or maybe it will all come out anyway, I don't know. (I should have asked him something about the 609 crash. He'd probably pretend to know something about that one too.)
In any event, I don't like this man - never have, actually. He and I go back a long way. He's not an honorable man by any stretch of the imagination. (There's more I could say but I won't.) And so I politely declined his kind invitation to...um..."lunch."
We shall see how well the 505 does in the market. If it's a success, then hooray for Bell! I remain skeptical.