Black hawk is a conventional helicopter that has been flying for years and is quite satisfactory. Back in 2014 the army asked for a fly off between the Bell Helicopter V280 tilt rotor design and the Sikorsky-Boeing Defiant a more or less conventional design with a pusher propeller for better speed.
After 8 well paid years of testing and tinkering the Army finally picked the Bell V280 which was faster. The V22 Osprey is the only tilt rotor currently in service. It can do 300-400 knots, but large conventional helicopters have better range and bigger payloads. Osprey has a poor safety record, a lot of crashes, some with troops on board and many deaths. It is not clear to me why the services care about speed. In Viet Nam we arranged for the troop carrying helicopters to arrive all at the same time. We had enough troops in the first wave to overwhelm the enemy, especially with gun ships supporting the infantry.
The Bell 280 is flying, at least the Aviation Week article shows it in the air. There is a juicy $7.3 billion of “startup money” for the V280. Actual production of V280’s will cost $70 billion. Aviation Week did not mention how many V280s that $70 billion will buy.
The Army said very little about the contract award, like why they picked Bell. Sikorsky-Boeing is thinking about suing to reverse the contract award. That ought to suck up another year or two.
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