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Member for

11 years 7 months

Posts: 3,156

Bell Touts Future Army Helicopter Design: 'V-280 Is Not a V-22'

A top official from Bell Helicopter said the company's design for the U.S. Army's future tiltrotor fleet will be far different than the 30-year-old design of the V-22 Osprey.

The chopper, known as the V-280 Valor, is part of the Army's Joint Multi-Role Demonstrator program to develop the technology for the Pentagon's Future Vertical Lift program.

The concept aircraft advances the design of the V-22, the first tiltrotor aircraft flown by Marine Corps and Air Force, according to Vince Tobin, vice president of Advanced Tiltrotor Systems for Bell Helicopter.

"The V-22 has instructed on what tiltrotors can do, and that is great, but the V-280 is not a V-22," Tobin told an audience Thursday at an Army aviation symposium put on by the Association of the United States Army.

"We are going to do it better than we did on the V-22. The V-22 was designed in the 1980s ... and we have taken it under our imperatives to fix what wasn't perfect on the V-22 and get as close to perfect as we can on the V-280."

Bell, which is owned by Textron Inc., partnered with Lockheed to develop the V-280, which is scheduled to make its first demonstration flight next year.

The Army's development effort could lead to a potentially $100 billion Future Vertical Lift program to replace the service's fleets of UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters made by Sikorsky and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters made by Boeing, though any aircraft probably wouldn't enter service until the 2030s.

...

"We actually have a wing put together for the demonstrator -- the upper and lower surfaces are on the wing, all the hydraulics lines, all the electrical and all the test equipment is inside," Tobin said. "We are putting this airplane together, and we expect to fly it in the fall of 2017."

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/01/15/bell-touts-future-army-helicopter-design-v280-is-not-a-v22.html?comp=7000023435700&rank=1

There were a lot of costly lessons learned with the Osprey, it is nice to see them applied to future designs. If the V280 does what it is supposed to it won't really have any competition.

Member for

17 years 3 months

Posts: 581

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Czech Mi-17 recovered in Spain (Zaragoza) after a crash.

Please, more photos of this Mi-171ŠM, it looks like it´s totaled!!! Not long time ago highly modernized and there is the end here now, ehhh

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Only could get pics from behind.

confirmed, the chopper is written-off...

Member for

16 years

Posts: 265

This must be part of the glorious future ahead for European rotary aviation folks were telling me about a few pages back.

Yep, they'll just have to settle for dominating every other class of helos, how depressing.. :D

Member for

13 years 5 months

Posts: 9,579

(from the above link):

This is very good. Ru should segment more their share of the market with stuff like this (affordable hi-tech).

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Source:
en.t-aviation.ru8

Apparently the Mi-28 has something similar (simpler I am guessing) in case the pilot is injured, the helicopter automatically flies back to base and hovers at a low enough height for the crew to get out.