Consider AgustaWestland and the AW609.
When they bought the rights from Bell Helicopter I had high hopes for it. If they could keep the price down then it would be a natural to take over the gunship role from pure helicopters like the AH-1Z. Check this out from the Dallas Business Journal...
The Marine Corps. is asking Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. to study equipping its mid-sized BA609 tilt-rotor aircraft for use as an armed escort for the V-22 Osprey troop transport, according to a local newspaper.I have heard nothing else.
The request was made by Lt. Gen. Michael Hough, the Marines' deputy commandant for aviation, who believes the V-22 will need an armed escort aircraft to carry Marines in and out of combat zones. Since helicopters are too slow to keep up with the V-22 and jets are too fast, the escort will have to be a tilt-rotor aircraft, Hough told the paper.
The BA609 was designed by Fort Worth-based Bell and British-Italian partnership AgustaWestland for civilian use. Its first flight was in March 2003 and currently it is in flight tests.
Bell reportedly has been working on a concept for a tilt-rotor gunship, including one that is a BA609 derivative. The company plans to make a presentation of its gunship design to the Marine Corps. sometime this summer.
If the government grants the Marines' request for an escort gunship, it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars for Bell and work for its employees for decades. That would be a long way off, however. The armed escort craft first would have to be designed, approved by the Pentagon, funded by Congress, prototyped and tested before assembly could begin.
I'm not even in AgustaWestland's sales department but if I was I'd be camping out at Ft. Campbell passing out AW609 coffee mugs and tee shirts to the boys in the 160th getting them excited about a UH-60 sized tilt rotor that could zoom in and insert/extract small teams of operators in bad places.
But they aren't.
I hate it for them. They could be tossing bones to SOCOM, Homeland Security, DoD and the rest of our government agencies but they haven't. The same applies to several other countries around the world that have Special Operations and internal security organizations that need the benefits of high speed and vertical lift.
The AW609 should have been the next evolution in vertical flight. But AgustaWestland pissed it away.
And that's a shame.
Tilt rotors sound real nice but I think the price tag even for AW609 is going to be very prohibitive. I think it will always been a bit of a niche role, only Marines so far have ordered V22, you think by now some rich Middle Eastern country would have plunked some money to buy a few, even the Israelis haven't gotten it yet and they won't even paying for them. Also, it seems like AW has had some problems with certification and some modifications are going to be made. Bell proposal to Army seems to me to verify this, they are trying to change the way Army looks at costs, sounds to me that Bell knows that their tilt rotor won't even come close on price so they have to muddy the waters and talk about how much more you can do with it so even though it is more expensive, it can do more....we'll see if Army goes for it.
ReplyDeleteIt might be that when AW bought the design off Bell, the terms and conditions stipulated that they were not to develop a military version so as to not provide competition against future Bell designs.
ReplyDeleteSpecifically they can't arm the 609, though it could be available for the likes of AEW. It's likely due to Bell's upcoming V-280.
DeleteThe services talk a lot of crap; maybe AW just didn't fall for it. The Army talked a big game about how it wanted innovation from company's on their own dime so Sikorsky built a whole new helicopter. What was Sikorsky's reward? The army strung out any decision long enough to give all of Sikorsky's competitors a chance to catch up and its obvious that after all the delays and wasted money on gold plated, dream vision requirements they are just going to upgrade the OH-58 again.
ReplyDeleteWhat the USMC did was invite AG to waste a huge amount of time and money on an aircraft that would never have been procured