Hamartia Antidote
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Bell’s Big Tiltrotor Win May Be a Turning Point in Aviation
Helicopters have been the leading VTOL technology for 75 years. Tiltrotors may change everything.
www.engineering.com
Helicopters have been the leading VTOL technology for 75 years. Tiltrotors may change everything.
With Bell’s recent win over the Lockheed Martin/Boeing consortium in the U.S. Army’s future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program, the long-awaited replacement for the venerable Sikorsky Black Hawk will be the Bell V-280 Valor. The Valor is a tiltrotor, and like the V-22 Osprey, combines vertical takeoff and landing with turboprop-like air speeds in horizontal flight. That’s good for the Army, but it also may herald a new era in civil aviation. Will helicopters be consigned to history?
The aerospace industry is a business, and like any business, the prospect of major contracts makes engineers sit up and take notice. With a long-range projected market of 60 to 90 billion dollars, the U.S. military’s need for advanced vertical takeoff attack and transport helicopters has boiled down to a classic matchup between the two American helicopter heavyweights: the Lockheed Martin/Boeing consortium and Bell.
Boeing is the parent company of Sikorsky who, along with Bell, founded the helicopter industry 75 years ago, and the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk has been in service for some three decades. All good things, however, come to an end—and as the Black Hawk nears the end of its service life, the potentially huge contract for a high-performance replacement is a race between an advanced coaxial rotor compound helicopter from the Lockheed/Boeing team, and Bell’s tiltrotor design.
The competition is the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program, with a sizable billion-plus dollars on the line to get an aircraft into production-ready form. Bell’s tiltrotor, the V-280 Valor, has won that contest, with a lightweight aircraft that can carry a crew of four and 14 troops up to 900 miles with a 320 mile-per-hour cruise speed in horizontal flight.
Externally, it can lift a 10,000-pound load. Those are impressive numbers, and it’s easy to see why the Army is excited about the prospect of moving people and cargo with the best of fixed wing and rotary wing performance in one airframe.
What isn’t being discussed, however, is the potential for this technology to really shake up civil aviation. The current service tiltrotor, the V-22 Osprey, was a controversial system plagued by program delays, cost overruns and several high-profile crashes. These had the effect of squashing civilian interest in this technology—although in Europe, the Leonardo AW 609 is going after the executive transport market with a similar machine.
The Osprey experience shows that tilt rotors do indeed work, although for civilian service the situation is a lot more complex than hauling troops and howitzers. The applications of this technology in the civil space are obvious, from downtown-to-international airport shuttles to true city-to-city transport at turboprop speeds, without the need for runways.
To deliver this service, several problems must be resolved. Certification of civilian tiltrotors is feasible, as the Leonardo team has paved the way forward, but pilot training and certification will likely mean some form of special endorsement, or specialized training for helicopter pilots, perhaps over and above type rating.
Support and maintenance for line operations will have to be calculated, from non-destructive testing procedures to a mean time between overhaul strategy that prevents these things from becoming hangar queens. And, of course, upfront procurement and seat mile costs must be competitive with existing large helicopters.
Large passenger-carrying helicopters are mature technology, and they got that way on the backs of decades of military experience with rotary wing aircraft. Along with that experience came a steady stream of trained helicopter technicians and pilots from the Armed Forces, forming a core cadre of people necessary to make civilian operations work.
Currently, there are few qualified people in the cockpit or on the line coming out of the V-22 Osprey program. But if the V-280 Valor is procured in the kind of numbers that the Army wants, in order to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk, then there will be a considerable number of people trained on this technology.
If the industry and the FAA creates the regulatory regime to make it work, and the people are in place, all that’s left for a company like Bell is to certify the Valor, or a lightweight variant for civilian use, and potentially open the door to an entirely new type of airline service. It’s unknown at this time if the Rolls-Royce power plants used in the Valor will be suitable for airline use, where time-on-wing is critical. But hundreds of these things in the hands of the U.S. Army is going to be a massive test program for the technology.
And when I look at the nightmare that represents large airports and modern air travel in general, the thought of boarding an aircraft from a rooftop downtown, then flying to another rooftop in another city looks promising. And I think I’ll pay a premium to experience it.
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