US Army's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator VTOL to Start Next Month

Want to see an advanced helicopter fly faster than 230 knots? Well, don’t get out your binoculars and cameras yet, aircraft-watchers.

What may be the next great leap forward in rotorcraft technology begins a month from now with a baby step. By early August, the Army-run Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator program is to choose which of four industry competitors will be given money to build a proof-of-concept aircraft incorporating new or exotic means of making rotorcraft fly faster and farther. The JMR TD is one part of a larger Future Vertical Lift program whose goals include producing a new medium-lift rotorcraft able to fly faster than 230 knots – a hundred knots or so as fast as most existing military helicopters cruise.

While the JMR TD aircraft are to start flight demonstrations in late 2017, any actual military aircraft they might help spawn will fly no sooner than a decade or more later, and probably 2035.

“We’re not building prototypes,” the Army program manager, Dan Bailey, told a CSIS panel discussion on the project Tuesday. “They’re demonstrator aircraft.”

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