VTOL brings its own problems. Aircraft going vertical has a tendency to blast down the deck. On asphalt runaways, they have a tendency to melt asphalt, leaving that spot unusable for other aircraft. You can melt or leave major hotspots on a carrier deck that can make it unusable with othe aircraft unless cooled. The draft caused by the VTOL can also pose problems.
In any case, its difficult to do a VTOL if the aircraft is loaded. Hence why Harriers still take off most of the time conventionally.
This issue has been worked out decades ago. VSTOL aircraft use a rolling take off either over a ski jump or on the longer decks of USN ships just use more room mainly to reduce fuel burn on take off, leaving the loaded aircraft with greater range. Landing is always vertical. Issues with deck erosion were sorted out decades ago with appropriate deck coatings, it is a non-issue now. A vertical take off is not hard at all actually, it just eats into the fuel in a big way.
"Oh thank heaven for HC-11"
Yes indeed ! I knew they transitioned to the MH-60S and were re-named HCS-21. Did you know their original mission, VERTREP or Vertical Replenishment, has been contracted out to Evergreen Aviation???. Amazing, the ammo ships I cruised on, and the AOE's that have replaced the Sacramento class I also cruised, have been switched to Military Sealift Command and are all civilian staffed. Somehow we are expected to believe it is cheaper to pay a civilian able bodied seaman who makes some serios jingle than it is to pay a lowly Navy Petty Officer to do the same job. I'm waving the BS flag on that one, but I don't get to make policy decisions. Evergreen is using Puma's to do the CH-46D's old job. Not as good a helo by any stretch for that mission but who knows how much the president of Evergreen contributes in election years, eh? Evergreen works for the CIA too, so he has that inside connection ( ps when I applied there ages ago they offered me a positon flying not for the Panamanian government but specifically for "Mr Noriega". I'm quite sure that job involved flying loads of drugs and I politely declined, ahem! ).
The tilt rotor. I have to wonder why anyone wants to fly something that expensive and that complex into a hot landing zone. Helo's get shot up during combat assualts, it is unavoidable. My thinking is to keep a combat assault helo simple and crashable like a Blackhawk. Hey, a Blackhawk is so tough you can literally loose all power, bottom the collective and hit the ground at 1500fpm and walk away. I you ever had access to the old Army safety pub Flighfax every week were outrageous accounts of Blackhawks striking the ground during some German snow storm at 80 kts and everyone walking away. One demo the Navy does is to put a Seahawk in a high hover on a taxiway with a student and the instructor yanks the power control levers off. Yee haaa. I have personally seen this taxiing by at North Island. The Seahawk drops like a rock, hits, bounces and hits again. Nothing is hurt, all in a normal day's work. You should see how the Army dogs pound those things into the weeds making a combat assault. First the tail wheel hits the dirt then the main gear. They slam it into the ground, bounce it a time or two, the troops run out and the pilot is arm-pitting the collective and nosing it over as the last guy leaves the cabin. I rather doubt the Marines will be able to get away with those shenanigans in a tilt rotor. Too big, too complicated and way to expensive to routinely abuse.
Where that thing makes tremendous sense if for special forces insertions ( too bad we didn't have them to rescue the hostages from Iran in 1979 ) and for things like ASW or AEW off small flight decks where you cannot fit an S-3 or E-2. Imagine a Cavour sized VSTOL ship using tilt rotors for long range ASW and AEW, that is the perfect mission for these. Neither mission involves a lot of hard landings or exposure to enemy fire. Ah well, the Marines want that thing and that is that. How many times has Congress cancelled it already? Oh, Boeing even made a prototype tandem rotor helo on their own dime as a hedge against the tilt rotor either failing or being cancelled. Google up the Boeing 360, it is an outstanding design that richly deserves to be built. Yeah, I'm queer for tandem rotors, but once you fly one nothing else compares.
