Posted on 05/22/2015 8:45:51 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. on Friday flew for the first time its next-generation light-attack helicopter, the S-97 Raider.
The test flight took place at the company’s developmental flight center in West Palm Beach, Florida. It comes as its parent company, United Technologies Corp., mulls a possible sale of the 90-year-old rotorcraft manufacturer.
The chopper’s coaxial design features counter-rotating rotor blades and a push propeller, among other innovations, that will allow it to fly much faster and farther than today’s choppers.
The Raider was initially designed to target a potentially $16 billion U.S. Army weapons acquisition program called the Armed Aerial Scout to replace the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, one of the smallest helicopters in the fleet. The service put the acquisition effort on hold due to budget restrictions.
But Sikorsky, which also makes the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and numerous other aircraft, still plans to sell the coaxial design both domestically and internationally. The company, along with several dozen supplies, have spent tens of millions of dollars designing and developing the technology.
“The aircraft was rock solid,” test pilot Bill Fell said of the test flight, according to Sikorsky’s Twitter account.
“We were completely ready to take on this task & we hit it out of the park today,” chief engineer Andy Bernhard said in another Tweet.
While Sikorsky is one of the world’s largest helicopter-makers with $7.5 billion in annual sales, it has seen its defense and energy markets shrink amid the end of large-scale, U.S.-led ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a drop in global oil prices driven by surging U.S. production, according to an article this month in The Wall Street Journal.
“UTC is exploring strategic alternatives for Sikorsky, which could include a sale or spinoff,” spokesman John Moran told the newspaper.
The Raider, rolled out during a glitzy ceremony in October at the company’s hangar in Jupiter, Florida, is one of two built for demonstration purposes. Most of the flight testing will take place in 2015.
Sikorsky in 2010 and 2011 flew an experimental prototype of the design called the X2 that reached speeds of up to 250 knots, or 290 miles per hour. By comparison, the Kiowa Warrior has a top speed of about 120 knots, or 140 miles per hour.
Sikorsky has also teamed with Boeing Co., which helps make the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, in proposing the SB>1 Defiant, a larger coaxial design, for the Army’s Joint Multi-Role technology demonstrator program, or JMR.
An attractive craft. I bet it can do rolls and stuff with the blade array such as it is.
I would have thought that the word "spinoff" would not be that popular among the helicopter community.
Co-axial designs have the advantage of symmetrical advancing blades.
More stable flight for sure...
PING
Looks Russian
“Spinoff”, such as the main rotor(s) coming off?
On many helicopters there is one nut that keeps the main rotor on, it’s called the Jesus nut. When it comes off, the first thing the pilot says is “Oh Jesus!”.
The purpose of the main rotor is to keep the pilot cool, because when it comes off he starts to sweat.
Once upon a time I was a AH-1G Cobra crew chief.
(We once had a poser tour a Veteran's Day display with his girlfriend, bragging he had flown a Cobra in Vietnam, and he had to punch out when he was shot down. We asked him where the ejection seat was to avoid the rotors, and he responded it was a side chute just to the left of the pilot's feet. He was wearing Charlies at the time with Captain's bars, but his shirt also had stitching marks where chevrons had been on the shoulders. Go figure. He was then asking for a travel advance from the reserve unit personnel. He was invited into the unit where the LtCol had 2 of his largest Gunnys flank both sides of him, pulled out the Blue Book, rendered immediate justice and ordered to Gunnys to escort him off the premises and they hauled him in the van several blocks away, dispatching him memorably.)
...and in whisper mode.../s
I’ve rode in a few helicopters... I’m not a fan. Several thousand pounds of loud, rattling, whirling, oil-soaked metal fatigue that I commonly refer to as a flying combine. There are way too many things to go wrong for my liking. Of course, I’m a bit paranoid when I get more than 100ft off the ground
Ever watch WWI movies, where the pilot had a machine gun shooting through the propeller? Those machine guns and engines were mechanically timed so the bullets would never hit the prop.
That’s the same idea with the Cobra. The ejection seat was timed so the pilot was ejected in such a manner that he would never hit the main rotor. To further the pilots safe ejection, the pitch on the rotor would actually reverse itself blowing air upwards to get the pilot farther away. This would also make the Cobra’s crash much faster with the rotor pushing it downward. This is where the helicopters on board computer came in, where it would take over the flight controls and aim the crashing chopper towards the enemy kamakazi style.
I hope I clarified your posers story.
That way the ejected pilot would only be diced into 5 pieces instead of 6?
Too high tech for combat use. Keep it simple stupid they say.
Interesting. After how many decades has the US finally come to act on the benefits of counter rotating rotors? Sure, they do have other problems but are they really that much worse than a parasitic tail rotor?
Exactly, so you musta been around Snakes to know this.
UTX (United Technologies stock symbol) is going to be a shell of what it was. My dad was an engineer at Pratt-Whitney main plant (East Hartford), so was two of my friends dads. Now the plant is about 1/5 of what is was. One of my friend’s dad got transferred to West Palm Beach. Now they want to sell Sikorsky - what next UTX? Selling Pratt?
Beautiful chopper...
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