V-280 & other current (non V-22) Tilt Rotor Aircraft

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Tyrant King
Bell’s V-280 Soon To Fly In 'Airplane Mode'
Apr 9, 2018
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| Aerospace Daily & Defense Report
  • v280ff.jpg

    V-280: Bell

    Bell’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor prototype is on track to tilt its nacelles all the way forward and fly in “airplane mode” by the end of April as it proceeds through its testing program, a company official says.

    The prototype, which made its first flight in December, now has 19 hr. of flight time and run for 75 hr. on the ground, says Scott Clifton, director for Global Military Business Development for Bell. That includes one flight out of the test pattern and around the city of Amarillo, Texas, where Bell’s facility is based. It has flown up to 80 kt.

    A company spokesman clarified one day later that Bell does not have a hard date for wing-borne flight, as the timeline will be dictated by progress made during testing.

    The V-280 was put together for the U.S. Army’s Joint-Multi-Role Technology Demonstration (JMR-TD), essentially a testbed for next-generation rotorcraft technologies that will feed into the Army’s Future Vertical Lift program.

    The Valor is the first demonstrator to fly.
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    and
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    have teamed up to build the SB-1 Defiant demonstrator that could fly by the middle of this year. Karem Aircraft and AVX Aircraft Co., which did not win a JMR-TD contract, have continued working on technologies that could feed into future Army aircraft.

    Though the fiscal 2019 budget was a boon to most military weapons systems, that was not the case with the FVL. A request for proposals for the FVL-Medium program that was due to be released in 2018 is now not scheduled until 2021, when assured funding is far less certain.

    Clifton pointed out that FVL remains one of the Army’s top three priorities. “As JMR moves forward, our goal is to continue to fly the V-280 and show that we can provide twice the range and speed and give the Army what it is looking for as a replacement” for the Army’s
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    Black Hawk, made by Sikorsky, and the
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    ’ UH-1 Huey, also made by Bell, he added.

    [Editor's Note:This story was updated to include additional comment from Bell regarding the time line of wing-borne flight.]
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TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
Army’s Future Vertical Lift team working out how to get a helo within a decade
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  1 day ago

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that falls under the service’s new
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has a goal of getting a new helicopter much earlier than the long-stated projection of fielding an aircraft in the early 2030s.
The Army secretary has essentially directed the new CFT designed to address the service’s third-highest modernization priority to look at ways to buy helicopters within 10 years, Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, the leader of the FVL CFT, said at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual summit on April 27.
“If we wait for a typical capability development, we are looking at the 2030s, and that is not my charge,” Rugen said. “The secretary told us this decade.”
The Army is now weighing when and how it will procure two specific helicopters. It’s possible the Army will develop requirements for other aircraft that would fit into an FVL family, but for now the service is focusing on a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft that would be categorized as a light helicopter and a Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft that would fit more in a medium-lift category.
Service leadership has been peppered with questions — since it articulated its intentions last month to focus on the two aircraft — as to whether it wants to first procure the attack reconnaissance or a long-range assault aircraft. Previously the Army was focused on prioritizing the medium-lift variant. But at the same time it consistently stated its No. 1 capability gap was armed reconnaissance.
But for the Army, the answer isn’t clear cut: It’s still analyzing all the possibilities. Leadership has explained that what will drive procurement, and when, will be based on when technology is ready at a reasonable cost.
“It’s not a prioritization thing,” Rugen said. “It’s where we find opportunity first.”
He added that industry has already shown great agility to bring something out of science and technology and, quite literally, into the sky rapidly through the
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that will inform FVL requirements. Bell is already flying its
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, and the
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will fly by the end of the year.
If something proves capable, the Army will jump on it, Rugen said, because “it gives us the speed we want.”
Meanwhile, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville took the opportunity at the Army Aviation Association of America event to ask the Army National Guard to provide leadership to the FVL team as the service develops its future aircraft.

“We are going to be a part of that and be right there in the decision-making for a new-start program and making sure that our capabilities are accounted for,” Brig. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the Army National Guard’s deputy commanding general at the Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker, Alabama, said at AAAA. “One of the things that the vice [chief of staff] pointed out is that FVL will not adversely affect [the Guard].”

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TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
V-280 Valor hits cruise speeds
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  4 hours ago
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demonstrator has now flown in cruise mode, reaching 190 knots.

To achieve cruise mode, the rotors in the V-280 pivot from vertical lift to fully forward-facing. While the company reached 190 knots in recent flight tests, it will continue to expand the envelope until it reaches an expected speed of 280 knots, a company spokesman told Defense News on May 15.

The aircraft is part of the Joint Multi-Role Demonstration program that will inform the U.S. military on requirements for a fleet of future helicopters expected to come online,
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.

There are two demonstrator aircraft involved in the program: Bell’s aircraft, and a Sikorsky-Boeing coaxial demonstrator
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.

Bell
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in December. Sikorsky and Boeing plan to begin flying their aircraft by the end of 2018.

According to Bell, the V-280 has logged more than 90 hours of rotor turn and more than 27 hours of flight time. The aircraft has been put through the paces of ground taxi and hover taxi tests as well as low-altitude hovering maneuvers to include 360-degree pedal turns and forward/aft/lateral repositions and 60 knot roll-on landings.
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TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
Bell confident on V-280 as development gathers pace

  • 25 MAY, 2018
  • SOURCE: FLIGHTGLOBAL.COM
  • BY: DOMINIC PERRY
  • PRAGUE


Bell Helicopter is confident that its new V-280 Valor tiltrotor will achieve the programme's targeted speed of 280kt (518km/h) later this summer, with the test aircraft having so far hit 190kt during initial transitions to forward flight.

"The chase plane is now an [Aero Vodochody] L-39 – we can't use a helicopter anymore as they are just not fast enough," Steve Mathias, vice-president of global military business development at the US manufacturer, told SMI's Helicopter Technology Eastern and Central Europe conference.

First flight of the V-280 – which has been produced for a US technology development effort – took place last December, and Bell has since accumulated around 30h on the platform, including sorties with its proprotors tilted horizontally.

"It is on track to hit 280kt by the summer. We are where we expected to be," says Mathias.

The aircraft is currently located at Bell's facility in Amarillo, Texas, but will move to its main Fort Worth site "later this year".

A second US Army test pilot has also now flown the aircraft, he says, following previous sorties with another army aviator on 7 February.

Bell is developing the V-280 as a risk-reduction exercise known as the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD), ahead of the USA's launch of its proposed Future Vertical Lift programme.

Mathias says the company is so confident in the V-280 that it could now theoretically move into the engineering, manufacturing and development phase of a typical US acquisition programme.

"We could go straight to the milestone B [decision] and cut out about four years of acquisition process," he says.

The JMR-TD phase is scheduled to last until 2019, with FVL likely to be launched in the early- or mid-2020s to begin deliveries in the 2030s.

Bell faces competition from a joint Sikorsky-Boeing team, which is building the SB-1 Defiant compound rotorcraft. However, that aircraft is running behind schedule and has yet to fly.
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TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
Bell’s V-280 Valor shows off agility, speed in first public flight demo
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  2 hours ago
AMARILLO, Texas — In less than six months,
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, built for a U.S. Army capability demonstration, has
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to
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of 195 knots and has been put through its paces in hover mode.

And V-280 continues to push the envelope as it flies deeper into the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstration (JMR-TD) that is expected to wrap up in fiscal year 2019 when the Army and its joint partners decide what it will
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aircraft that is
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[
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]

Valor flew for a small group of reporters in its first public demonstration June 18 at Bell’s Amarillo production facility, where its legacy tiltrotor — the V-22 Osprey — is still coming off the production line for the Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force.

The demonstration, according to Bell, was just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of what the aircraft is capable of doing.



The V-280’s clean sheet design differs from the V-22 with a straight wing, fixed-engine nacelles, sliding side doors, a lower disc loading that reduces downwash and a tail dragger configuration (the signature V on the tail of the aircraft), according to Ryan Ehinger, the V-280 program manager.

Bell has had representatives from the U.S. Army on site throughout the development of the aircraft, he said.

While Bell has been moving the V-280 rapidly through key performance parameters set by the Army, it still has a ways to go before it reaches the edges of the V-280s capabilities, but it is proceeding on track, Ehinger said.

The company has logged nearly 40 flight hours in the test program while its testing and engineering team has closely monitored the aircraft’s telemetry in flight including watching thousands of instrumentation channels coming off the aircraft in real time, he added.

In the demonstration, the pilots hand-flew the aircraft with very limited augmentation to show that they are able to fly in the most degraded capability while maintaining good handling qualities.

The V-280 took off in a hover during the demonstration and rapidly climbed to 500 feet above ground level and made several passes over the crowd.

On its first pass, the aircraft reached roughly 170 knots, which is already faster than any helicopter’s cruise speed. On the second pass, the V-280 reached 175 knots, which is equivalent to 201 miles per hour, according to Frank Lazzara, Bell’s advanced tiltrotor systems business development manager who spent 11 years flying V-22s in the Air Force’s Special Operations Command.

At full rate, pylon transition to cruise mode takes 20 seconds, Lazzara said.

While not demonstrated, the company’s test pilots have reached 195 knots out of the goal speed of 280 knots, which Bell fully expects will be reached by the end of the test program, according to Ehinger.

In cruise mode during the demonstration, the aircraft showed it has a much lower acoustic signature than a V-22.

The V-280 also demonstrated a roll-on landing — which is important because it significantly increases the configurations and weights with which it can take off and land — as well as an 80-degree jump takeoff that is commonly used in tactical situations and requires less power, Lazzara described.

While not yet demonstrated, ultimately the aircraft will be able to decelerate from over 250 knots and land in vertical mode in about one minute, he said.

The test pilots demonstrated the agility of the aircraft in hover by flying the aircraft laterally across a runway at a very low altitude and performed several pirouettes that combined both lateral and yaw motion of the aircraft.

Following the demonstration, one of Bell’s test pilots, Don Grove, who has extensive experience flying V-22s, said that even on the first flight he was “pleasantly surprised” by how easily controllable the aircraft is, even in high winds, which are common in Amarillo.

“You know, the V-22, I love that aircraft,” Grove said, “but it’s more of a truck. This is more of a sports car and the agility in this thing, both in low speed… but even how agile it is in cruise mode, is really, I think, in all honesty, we don’t need as much agility as we have right now.”

Valor will continue to push the envelope on objective flight profiles as part of the JMR demonstration as the Army continues to flesh out what it wants in a future vertical lift aircraft.

In the near future, the aircraft will begin flying with the landing gear raised up to achieve faster cruise modes, Grove said. And the aircraft will be flown with higher levels of augmentation, easing up the pilots’ burden of handling the aircraft.

The V-280 will also be tested with Lockheed Martin’s Pilotage Distributed Aperture System (PDAS) later this year and the pilots will test out flying with heads up and heads down displays, according to Ehinger.
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now
Experimental helicopter Raider cleared for full flight test program
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Sikorsky’s
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— an experimental coaxial helicopter — has met the required objectives to move forward into its full flight test program with its second prototype after the first aircraft was sidelined following
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, according to the company’s vice president for Future Vertical Lift.

The second aircraft
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at the company’s West Palm Beach, Florida, facility.

Operating the Raider for 90 minutes June 19, pilots Bill Fell and John Groth completed the flight test card, marking a “significant milestone” that will allow Sikorsky to proceed with its full flight test program, Dan Spoor told Defense News in a June 20 statement.

“We look forward to demonstrating to the U.S. military that high flight speed and extraordinary maneuverability in the hover and low speed regimes will dramatically change the way that military aviators fly and fight with helicopters,” he said.

The plans to get back into the test program appear to be happening on schedule. Sikorsky was shooting to get the helicopter back in the air in the summer and pick up where it left off with its first aircraft.

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, the company had been able to complete low speed handling, and in 20 hours of flight testing, it expanded the speed envelope to 150 knots.

This summer, the plan is to push the speed above 200 knots, which is the next step in achieving speeds well over that benchmark.

Sikorsky believes it has solved the problem that caused the first prototype’s hard landing.

The first hard landing had nothing to do with Sikorsky’s X2 coaxial technology used both in Raider and its
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the company is building with Boeing for the Army’s Joint Multi-Role demonstration which will help define requirements for a Future Vertical Lift aircraft expected to fly in the 2030s.

Defiant is expected to fly by the end of the year.

“The neighborhood of the root cause is the complex interaction between the ground, the landing gear, the flight control system and the associated pilot interactions,” Chris Van Buiten, Sikorsky’s vice president of technology and innovation, said in response to a National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report issued in September 2017.

The findings required Sikorsky to make some changes to the flight-control system software to assure the same thing will never happen again, Van Buiten said.

Sikorsky is hoping the U.S. Army will choose Raider for its
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The service has not yet indicated how and when it will procure a new helicopter that meets such a mission.
 

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
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V280_10.jpg

The Aviationist said:
Bell’s
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has flown in level flight with its tiltrotors in the horizontal/cruise mode for the first time this week. The aircraft reached 190 knots (218 MPH) during the flight.

The new
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is a medium, tactical tiltrotor aircraft designed for the U.S. Army Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program. The JMR-TD program is a precursor for the Army’s overall Future Vertical Lift (FVL) co-development and evaluation of possible replacements for existing rotorwing aircraft in five different roles. The V-280 Valor is a proposed candidate for a new JMR-Medium utility and attack helicopter to potentially replace the
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utility helicopter and the
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attack helicopter.

The Bell V-280 is reportedly capable of a maximum speed of 280 knots or 322 MPH, hence the name “V-280”. That is significantly faster than the U.S. Army’s existing UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters’ maximum speed of 192 knots or 222 MPH and nearly as fast as the
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aircraft with a top speed at sea level of 305 knots or 351 MPH according to Bell Boeing.
The V-280 Valor is intended to carry up to 14 troops in a tactical personnel transport configuration with a crew of four including two flight crew and two gunner/loadmasters. It may also be developed with the capability to be an attack helicopter with various weapons onboard as depicted early in the program in a concept video showing an animated assault on a high altitude insurgent camp during hot weather. High altitude/hot weather flight conditions, called “High and Hot”, are challenging for most existing rotor wing aircraft. The V-280 will be optimized for high and hot operations.

While similar in visual configuration to the existing V-22 Osprey tiltrotor in service with the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Marines, the V-280’s engines remain in a fixed position on the wing while only the tiltrotors change geometry from vertical flight to horizontal flight. One advantage to this system is that both tiltrotors on the V-280 can operate off a single engine. On the V-22 Osprey both of the entire engine nacelles rotate
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Another unique feature of the V-280 Valor is the one-piece carbon fiber composite wing section. The one-piece composite wing uses Large Cell Carbon Core technology, reducing costs by over 30% compared to the construction of the V-22 Osprey wing. The one-piece wing is also integral to the ability of the twin tiltrotors to operate off power from only one engine if needed.

The Bell V-280 Valor competes with the
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aircraft in the JMR-TD program. The SB-1 Defiant uses two contra-rotating rotors and a “pusher” style tail rotor in a more traditional helicopter configuration as compared to the Bell V-280 tiltrotor design.

As the V-280 program advances through flight testing the aircraft has now flown 27 hours with approximately 90 hours of time turning the rotors in ground and flight tests. The aircraft has demonstrated its ground taxi and hover capability as well as low-altitude maneuvers including 360-degree pedal turns and forward/aft/lateral repositions along with 60 knot roll-on landings.

The next phase of flight operations for the V-280 will include maximum speed flights scheduled for some time within the next 90 days according to Bell. “During the summer, we plan on reaching most of the required performance parameters that were part of the test program,” said Jeffrey Schloesser, Bell’s executive vice president of strategic pursuits, during an interview last month with Aviation Week.


 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
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Bell is really starting to push the V247 Vigilant. The Drone concept is based on the Valor in terms of configuration. Targeted by the Marines for the MUX program.
Ground attack, was shown
@Jeff Head
Included in the model was shown is a ASW bird.
And apparently the Marines are looking for a AEW asset and recon version.
 

Equation

Lieutenant General
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Bell is really starting to push the V247 Vigilant. The Drone concept is based on the Valor in terms of configuration. Targeted by the Marines for the MUX program.
Ground attack, was shown
@Jeff Head
Included in the model was shown is a ASW bird.
And apparently the Marines are looking for a AEW asset and recon version.

Probably will be use extensively for the Marines MARSOC (RAIDERS) units.:)
 

thecheeto

New Member
I found this picture of a naval variant on another blog. Anyone seen an article or anything mentioning this?
 

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