PacoPollo said:
That thing is like the Space shuttle....I wouldnt ride on neither, not even for a green card!
If I had the authority I wouldn't let you on either. Even if you were in handcuffs going back south of the border! For all the racket you make here you're not so macho as you pretend! When I get the time travel machine up I will try to get you a ticket on the Titanic though, in steerage of course...hehehe!
I cannot believe all the naysayers here. The V-22 is a real technological challenge and will probably continue to have some issues. But condeming it over a compressor stall is b.s. It is machine that is doing things that nothing else can do and IMHO the concept is sound and has fantastic potential. Not tomorrow maybe but not too long from now either.
The Bell 47 was so unreliable at first when they went to demo it for the brass hats they towed it on a flatbed near the site and flew it about two miles, put on the show, flew back to the trailer and towed it home...and tore it apart to find out what had broken that time!
If you study anything about the test programs of the 40's-60's you know that there were all kinds of fatal events and that there were several programs that attempted what the V-22 is doing now that never got as far as this has.
If I am not mistaken the prototype F-14 crashed on it's first flight. The Blackhawk killed a bunch of people early on too. There were several F-111's and F-117s that crashed early on in their programs. All of have since proved themselves in combat.
The thing that I did notice is that the paper called it a turbofan engine. Shouldn't they have called it a turboshaft engine?
That airbus that cracked up on the demo flight a few years back-are you all afraid of them now too?