PDAS is a multi-functional sensor system that generates high-resolution, 360° all-weather pilotage imagery to aircrew. In a series of flight tests in March, PDAS captured complete spherical infrared imagery while operating in a high-speed flight environment and generated real-time imagery. The final test won’t come until the Army gets its hands on it, and makes the call on which of the options is not just the better aircraft, but the better weapon.Lockheed Martin's Pilotage Distributed Aperture Sensor (PDAS) system has flown aboard Bell Helicopter's V-280 Valor tiltrotor aircraft in Fort Worth, Texas, the company announced on 15 April. The Army hasn’t set a hard deadline on when the testing phase must wrap up, and the V-280 likely still has several years of work left to do to prove itself. The Army would like to enjoy the same benefits.” “There is widespread awareness among senior Army leaders that tilt-rotor technology has delivered big advantages to the Marine Corps in terms of range, speed, endurance, and payload. “Valor has performed exceptionally well in testing and currently looks like the odds-on favorite to prevail,” says military analyst Loren Thompson, of the Lexington Institute. None of this guarantees the V-280 will make its final milestone, the one that really matters to Bell: beating out the Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant. “In the event of an impact, all the energy is displaced out and away from the aircraft, just as in a Nascar crash.” “All we have above our heads here is a driveshaft between the two engines, which allows for single-engine control of both rotors,” Josselyn says. Because these bits sit at the wing tips of the tilt-rotor, they can’t come crashing into the cabin during a hard landing. Look up and you may register the absence of the engine, transmission, rotor, and fuel, a combined 6,000 pounds of hardware that rest on top of conventional helicopters. There’s plenty of room for it, though-the V-280 has 30 percent more cargo capacity than the Black Hawk. Josselyn says that allows engineers to more quickly and efficiently test the systems, and also prepare ahead of time for each test flight.įor now, the interior behind the cockpit is filled with an array of neatly organized test instrumentation, including a tablet interface that allows an engineer to inject errors or failures into the system to gauge how the aircraft reacts, and 700 channels of sensor input, including accelerometers and temperature, pressure, and strain gauges. In this simulator, pilot control movements prompt responses from real sample actuators and control surfaces, rather than just digital facsimiles of those in the software. Helping that along is Bell’s Systems Integration Lab. “That allows us to get this out to the war fighter sooner,” Josselyn says. Keeping the part count low, Bell figures, will improve manufacturing cost and speed, minimize possible failure points, and ultimately compress the acquisition phase, since the testing can move along faster. Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, lets Bell produce complex parts as single pieces rather than multi-element constructions. Where the V-22 rotated its entire engine to flip between vertical and horizontal flight, the V-280 moves just its rotors. “The whole idea from the beginning has been to find simple solutions for complex designs,” says Jeff Josselyn, manager of V-280 flight maintenance at Bell’s Arlington, Texas, headquarters. That connection has concentrated extra attention on the aircraft’s testing phase, and Bell and partner Lockheed Martin, which is in charge of the avionics and weapons systems, have done just about everything they can to smooth out its adolescence. The two aircraft don’t share any hardware, but they both use swiveling rotors to switch between flying vertically (to take off and land like a helicopter) and horizontally (to cruise like a plane). The first one, the Bell/Boeing V-22 Osprey flown by the Marines, endured a notoriously protracted, complicated, expensive, and often disastrous development process. The V-280 is just the second tilt-rotor aircraft to be created for the military. Novelty and history conspire to make that timeline impressive. And that bodes well for Bell’s bid to win the contract to replace the Army’s aging Black Hawk helicopter. In the first 12 months of its airborne testing regimen, the aircraft has spent 85 hours aloft and bagged a series of speed, distance, and maneuvering milestones. To consider all the Bell V-280 Valor has accomplished, it’s surprising to remember that it was just over a year ago-on December 18, 2017-that it took to the air for the first time.
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