Boeing FARA

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No wings, and it's not a co-ax. That's different. Compounds mostly have wings to offload the rotor at speed, and if possible you slow the rotor down to mitigate the advancing/retreating issues - co-ax helos obviously address that problem differently. IIRC the Cheyenne only put 300 hp into the rotor at high speed. Anyone recall any other single-rotor, wingless compounds?
 
Come on Boeing, aren`t you ashamed to reveal this half baked farce? It looks like a last minute sketch taken from 1960ies with a stacked pushprop at the end. Very disappointed. Just to think 25 years ago you were capable of Comanche design.
 
Intake only on one side???

That asymmetry is true of the Bell 360 Invictus, too - exhaust only on one side. Two intakes - but one for the engine, one for the auxiliary power pack
 

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this begs the question, the designs seem very similar to the Comanche.. so why didn't they choose that the first time around?
 
this begs the question, the designs seem very similar to the Comanche.. so why didn't they choose that the first time around?

Comanche program got canned in 2004, mainly because the army needed the funds to modify upgrade sustainment of existing AH-64A/D, UH-60A/L, CH-47D fleet out for Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom,

cheers
 
Well that, and Rumsfeld's delusion that it's roles could be carried out by UCAR (said program collapsing two years later after huge sums of money & other resources had been squandered on it including funds originally diverted from the Comanche program).
 
If conventional helicopter configurations are good enough for FARA as Bell hopes could the plans for the Comanche been dusted off, modernized and still meet most/all FARA requirements? Would such a thing have been considered in an analysis of alternatives? I guess that would require a new partnership between Boeing and Sikorsky which is pretty unlikely now.

I'm sure there are financial reasons why a contractor would rather come up with a new design instead of revisiting one that never entered series production. Plus it's valuable experience for the design team.
 
Comanche has a very bad connotation in Army Aviation. It is known as "The C word". To ne mentioned at ones own peril. I am sure that both Boeing and Sikorsky have included bits from the program.
 
Comanche has a very bad connotation in Army Aviation. It is known as "The C word". To ne mentioned at ones own peril. I am sure that both Boeing and Sikorsky have included bits from the program.
Why is it viewed so poorly? From a technical point of view I don't see anything readily wrong with it. It seems like it would have made an excellent pairing with the Apache Longbow.
 
I'm sure there are financial reasons why a contractor would rather come up with a new design instead of revisiting one that never entered series production.

After 16 years since cancellation, your first challenge will be finding the project documentation, next challenge, trying to figure out if any of your computers can read it. (I was once tangentially involved in an in-project attempt to see if we could do this on one of our prior development iterations, it didn't go well, even though we were only a year or two on from archiving it). Assuming you can read everything, you then have to deal with component obsolescence, and at 16 years out of date, on a project that was initiated almost 40 years ago, and where the developmental hardware first flew almost a quarter of a century ago. You're at 'it's cheaper to throw it away and start over' even before your engineers start trying to figure out the logic of design decisions that in some cases will have been made before they were born.

It's almost certainly quicker and cheaper to start over.

(On a software basis, Comanche was an Ada aircraft, so you'd need to source Ada literate engineers to work on the software, even if just to convert it to C++. We're out there, but the difficulty of sourcing enough of us, when C++ has wider applicability outside defence meaning most engineers prefer to have it on their CV, not Ada, meant DoD had to opt to go C++ on F-35.)
 
Unlike Ada, C++ allows programmers to take (often ill-advised and even dangerous) shortcuts in creating code, which is why it is the more popular of the two languages. Ada (sometimes written down as ADA) on the other hand was intended to be as foolproof as humanly possible, a useful attribute when developing mission critical applications.
 
[HUMOR] Pfftt! I knew that ADA was going to fail as a commonly used language when Borland failed to come out with "Turbo ADA". [/HUMOR]

Tabs -or- spaces, anyone ?
 
Comanche has a very bad connotation in Army Aviation. It is known as "The C word". To ne mentioned at ones own peril. I am sure that both Boeing and Sikorsky have included bits from the program.
Why is it viewed so poorly? From a technical point of view I don't see anything readily wrong with it. It seems like it would have made an excellent pairing with the Apache Longbow.
While it was not a technical failure the program process was a failure. In fairness part of that was due to the uneven funding of the effort that drew it out and caused a running change to the requirements. The program ended up (until it was cancelled) expending almost all of the funding for the entire Army Aviation portfolio. As mentioned above when it was terminated the funds allowed upgrade to almost the entire Army helicopter fleet. A hard decision for Aviation, but it was the right one.
 
I'm sure there are financial reasons why a contractor would rather come up with a new design instead of revisiting one that never entered series production.

After 16 years since cancellation, your first challenge will be finding the project documentation, next challenge, trying to figure out if any of your computers can read it. (I was once tangentially involved in an in-project attempt to see if we could do this on one of our prior development iterations, it didn't go well, even though we were only a year or two on from archiving it). Assuming you can read everything, you then have to deal with component obsolescence, and at 16 years out of date, on a project that was initiated almost 40 years ago, and where the developmental hardware first flew almost a quarter of a century ago. You're at 'it's cheaper to throw it away and start over' even before your engineers start trying to figure out the logic of design decisions that in some cases will have been made before they were born.

It's almost certainly quicker and cheaper to start over.

(On a software basis, Comanche was an Ada aircraft, so you'd need to source Ada literate engineers to work on the software, even if just to convert it to C++. We're out there, but the difficulty of sourcing enough of us, when C++ has wider applicability outside defence meaning most engineers prefer to have it on their CV, not Ada, meant DoD had to opt to go C++ on F-35.)
Thank you for the explanation here. My experience with CAD programs is very limited but it's so common place wouldn't the file types used have been standardized a long time ago? Or is it other forms of documentation that are the problem?

Would having access to the final RAH-66 prototypes be of any benefit at all to a design team even if they are working on a "clean sheet" design? Obviously the avionics would be out of date but it seems like it could still be things to learn from it.
 
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Would having access to the final RAH-66 prototypes be of any benefit at all to a design team even if they are working on a "clean sheet" design? Obviously the avionics would be out of date but it seems like it could still be things to learn from it.
[/QUOTE]

No doubt both Boeing and Sikorsky have culled through RAH-66 to see what is reusable. I would venture that anything used will be internal in the dynamics and associated equipment. One might make a superficial argument that Bell has most closely taken the RAH-66 design forward with its proposal. Of note, I am led to believe that the gun being used for FARA is the one that was original developed for RAH-66.
 
My experience with CAD programs is very limited but it's so common place wouldn't the file types used have been standardized a long time ago? Or is it other forms of documentation that are the problem?

Think how long MS Office has been around, yet you still regularly get it saying "If I convert this file to the latest format you will lose some formatting". Or imagine trying to run a Win 95 programme on Windows 10.

To quote Wiki on CATIA (pretty much the aerospace standard and definitely used by Boeing in that period, with a quick google suggesting it was indeed used on Comanche): "In the years prior to 2000, problems caused by incompatibility between versions of CATIA (Version 4 and Version 5) led to $6.1B in additional costs due to years of project delays in production of the Airbus A380 "

It's entirely possible Comanche never made the leap from V4 to V5, or even from V3 to V4. Then there's the additional potential that the Comanche iteration of CATIA was running on a version of Unix that just isn't around anymore.
 
Catia like SolidWorks have integrated file transfer algorithms that will convert any prior version models (assembly and part) without much trouble. It's even one annoying aspect of those software to let one single user in a group contaminate all the data base forcing an entire team through an hasten unplanned and unwanted version swap.
:rolleyes:
 
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