Up Next: Building, Testing, Engineering…

Bell Helicopter has been down-selected for Phase 2 of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s SPRINT X-Plane program, but that’s a good thing!

The wording is apparently a positive turn of DARPA phrase that indicates Bell Textron, Inc will move forward in the Speed and Runway Independent Technologies (SPRINT) X-Plane program and complete their design for a demonstrator. They’ll go as far as construction, ground testing, and certification of the aircraft eventually, and hopefully snag some plush contracts along the way. SPRINT hopes to end up with a STOL or VTOL aircraft that can hit cruise speeds from 400 to 450 knots “at relevant altitudes”, while still being able to hover in austere environments from unprepared surfaces. As we’ve seen from previous attempts, it’s a tough recipe to really ‘nail’, but as technology has advanced, it’s much more achievable for a tiltrotor speed demon than it was in decades past.

Bell was in Phase 1A and 1B, where they finished off the conceptual and preliminary designs for the SPRINT X-plane. But that’s the easy part, before all the practical engineering imposes its demands and reality rears its homely head again. Phase 2 gets into that, though, away from glossy CGI renders of fancy, futuristic spacecraft, and gets into actually making the kind of aircraft DARPA demands. If they nail Phase 2, then Phase 3 will see actual flight tests of the design.

In fairness, Bell says they’ve done more than just made cool posters of their design, noting that they’ve “completed significant risk reduction activities including demonstrating folding rotor, integrated propulsion, and flight control technologies at Holloman Air Force Base as well as wind tunnel testing at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) at Wichita State University.” So they’ve been doing a lot more than sketching out dream planes in math class…

FMI: www.txtav.com