Bell's revolutionary X-plane rotorcraft has received the green light to progress to the building and testing of a ...

Bell Textron Inc. (Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.), a Textron Inc. company, has been down-selected for Phase 2 of the Defense ...

The X-plane demonstrator builds on Bell’s experience with tiltrotor aircraft, but with a new stop/fold rotor feature that ...

The SPRINT project is a joint DARPA/ US Special Operations Command effort that aims to fly an X-plane. The program had entered phase one in November 2023, and in May 2024, Aurora Flight Sciences and ...

Bell will design and build a high-speed VTOL demonstrator for DARPA’s SPRINT program, as Aurora exits the competition.

Flight tests are scheduled for 2018 and DARPA says that the VTOL X-Plane technology is also suitable for manned aircraft. The animation below shows the DARPA VTOL X-Plane in action.

DARPA’s VTOL X-plane initiative takes a cocktail of totally innovative technologies and puts them together in one aircraft design that could very well solve some of the chronic limitations of ...

DARPA is asking for rather a lot of its X-Plane hopefuls. Down the road, when a one-off "technology demonstrator" VTOL aircraft gets built, it will need to be able to hit all four of these points: ...

In Phase 3, DARPA intends to fly a 7,000-pound X-plane that addresses the two primary technical hurdles of incorporation of AFC into a full-scale aircraft and reliance on it for controlled flight.

The VTOL X-plane is intended to fly at impressive speeds—somewhere in the 300 to 400 knot range. On their website, DARPA announces they’re also eyeing to raise a number of aircraft specs.

DARPA is cross-pollinating a helicopter and a plane for its vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) Experimental Plane program, also known as the VTOL X-Plane.

Improved speed is the main goal for the X-Plane, but it’s hardly the only one. DARPA also wants greater hover and cruise efficiency than existing helicopters.