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 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 ...

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

Bell Textron has been selected by US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 2 of its Speed and Runway Independent Technologies (SPRINT) X-Plane programme. The objective of Phase 2 ...

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

DARPA named Bell Textron to proceed with the next phase of its SPRINT X-Plane project, to design and build an aircraft that ...

DARPA aims to perform VTOL X-Plane flight tests by 2018. "This VTOL X-Plane won't be in volume production in the next few years but is important for the future capabilities it could enable," Bagai ...

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: ...

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.