Helicopter Hybird

[McColm]

The US Army is looking for a high-speed vertical lift to replace its Apaches and Black Hawks with rotor aircraft that have the abilities of a  helicopter with the performance of a turboprop beyond 2030.
Bell Boeing and AgustaWestland have been developing tiltrotor aircraft such as the V-22 Osprey ,Rotordyne and AW609.
Eurocopter X3 and Sikorsky X2 examples dispense with the tail rotor and use two vertical stabilizers bearing small elevators and different connected to a tailplane. Power goes through the usual turboshaft to the main rotor and two tractor propellers attached to stub wings . These provide forward flight and act as an anti-torque device .

In the modeling world this is open to all sorts of ideas . As I have already mentioned I intend to add two turboprop engines to a Mil Mi-6 Hook.

[The Wooksta!]

They really just want quite a few of these:

[deathjester]

Gah!!  Beat me to it - I was gonna post that!

Strikes me that they could have had that with the S-67 Blackhawk, not to mention the AH-56...which, in the end DID work!!

[The Wooksta!]

The AH-56 was overly complex in some areas and it had speeds that encroached on Air Force territory.  I don't know much about the Blackhawk.

There's a long piece of Airwolf fan-fic somewhere on t'interweb which has a developed Cheyenne - the Coyote - as a precursor to the Airwolf design.

[deathjester]

If you're any fan of Airwolf, then look up the Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk - it could actually manage some of what Airwolf was supposed to, as well as carry a squad of troops too !!  Think of a super sleek, hi tech version of the Mi-24 Hind, and you're about halfway there...

[rickshaw]

Blackhawk and Cheyenne were intended for a very different sort of tactics compared to the Apache.  Apaches are designed to hover and pop-up over concealing terrain and fire their missiles.  The Blackhawk and the Cheyenne were designed to fire unguided rockets while flying forward at high-speed (so that their wings would provide considerable lift, unloading the rotor).  They were more akin to auto-gyros than helicopters in many ways.

That aside, I always had a soft-spot for both helicopters, they were sleek, good-looking and very advanced for their time.  It's interesting that both the Mi24 and the Blackhawk had similar evolutions (a medium transport helicopter that got wrapped in an attack helicopter's skin).

[kerick]

That's how we got the Cobra, just a smaller scale.
I was out on the range for testing of the Sgt York AAA system. The Apaches used the pop up tactic to good effect.