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Radical Dual Tilting Blade Helicopter Design Targets Speeds of Over 270mph
Zothecula writes: As one of the contenders in the race to win a $100 billion contract from the U.S. government for the next generation of attack helicopter in the Army's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program, AVX Aircraft Company has conceived a futuristic machine kitted out with coaxial rotors, ducted fans and a retractable undercarriage that could hit speeds of over 270 mph (435 km/h).
While a simpler and more conservative design, a helicopter like this already exists: The Eurocopter (now Airbus) X3.
Not yet in production but several functioning machines that already reached speeds of 472 km/h.
Of course this is a civillian design, not military, and has far less transport capacity, but the technology is working already. This is beyond prototype stage and ramped up for commercial prodcution right now.
Eurocopter also planned to compete in the FVL program, but since the US would have claimed IP in this case, a civilian production would not have been possible without paying licence fees to the US (despite the US not contributing any development ressources or IP).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually, it's like $12.74B in 2014, at least according to the inflation calculator at http://www.bls.gov/data/inflat... .
Christ, folks. It's numbers. It should be easy to validate the numbers you use before you randomly vomit them on the interwebz.