According to Wikipedia, the minimum autorotation altitude is 3,000'. I don't know how noisy those buggers are going to be, but I suspect that they'll be flown more at turboprop altitudes than helicopter altitudes. The selling point for a tiltrotor is being able to go high, far and fast, while landing and taking off from helipads.*
* The Hamptons crowd will love them.
4 comments:
It's an interesting little bugger alright. Bell's been flying it out south of Fort Worth for the last couple of years working on the flight envelope. FL250 is indeed as high as that sucker's been flown and/or cleared, and they spent quite a bit of time over the last 2 years in 3-5,000 foot altitude blocks testing rapid descents and maneuvers while tooling along at 200-250 knots across the ground, in the range of 15,000-25,000.
From a watching it on radar doing working, it seems like a useful enough utility aircraft. Their initial chase plane was a Citation 500, which suggests pretty decent performance as a turboprop. We were a little surprised they didn't use a King Air or such. We always thought of it as equivalent to a Super King Air 300 for picturing how it was going to fly.
Do you have any info on 1-engine-out behaviour?
Stu, no, I don't. The engines are cross-connected, so both rotors will turn, but I imagine that landing with one out will be like landing a light twin with one out: You're really not going around.
RUMINT is that the Marines have given a V-22 to the presidential squadron, but the Secret Service won't let the President fly in it. (There's precedent for that, the Secret Service wouldn't let FDR fly in a C-87.)
Stu, we work 12,001+ in that area, so we didn't see any of the low/slow and engine out work. Waco Approach may have seen it, but it's most likely the activity took place at Fort Worth-Alliance, sicnce that's the area where Bell does their autorotation training now. Maybe a D10 controller could inform us.
Post a Comment