 Aircraft that take off like a helicopter and fly like an airplane may have a future in commercial and military aviation. The tilt rotor design offers vertical take off and landing capabilities while providing high speeds during cruise. At the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Army researchers are preparing a tilt rotor model to analyze in a massive wind tunnel and innovate new scientific solutions for the design of advanced tilt rotor aircraft, a possible key to achieving Army modernization goals for future vertical lift. Tilt rotors are like the V-22 Osprey aircraft that the Marines currently use. Their benefit is they have very high flight speeds. They can transition from a helicopter configuration to a forward flight configuration that looks more like a turboprop aircraft. Using foundational aerodynamics research and computational models, researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory, the Army's Corporate Research Laboratory known as ARL, will shape future vertical lift with analysis of tilt rotor design challenges. The data we're going after is completely new. It doesn't currently exist. We want to be able to model what's called world-flutter stability for high-speed tilt rotor configurations for future vertical lift. The Army launched the TrAST program, or the Tilt Rotor Aeroelastic Stability Testbed. Tilt rotor designs require a compromise between a spinning helicopter rotor for efficient hovering and a fixed wing for forward flight. ARL researchers are bridging a scientific gap by providing underpinning research that will validate modeling for tilt rotor aircraft of the future. Their goal? To increase reach, enhance protection and lethality, and deliver agility and mission flexibility. With an advanced tilt rotor design, the Army can get there, stay there, and dominate what officials call multi-domain battle. When it comes to a flight vehicle, it all comes down to lift. You still have to produce a lift, and whether it's through a wing or through a rotor, lift is produced by moving air. And so those fundamental physics haven't changed since the Wright Brothers. There are some limitations to what you can do with rotorcraft technology. And so those sorts of concepts where you use different properties at different flight speeds to basically minimize the drawbacks of each, is pretty much what is necessary to achieve the really high performances that the Army wants to achieve. Researchers are working closely with industry partners to fabricate the test model. The scaled-down tilt rotor assembly and partial wing are loaded with sensors and designed to be attached to the wall of the NASA wind tunnel. NASA has some very unique facilities that the Army does not have. This particular facility, the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel, is a large wind tunnel facility. It's a very unique facility. It's the only one like it in the world. What we're looking for is how will that aircraft respond dynamically as it's flowing through the air. Army researchers are working on complex flight problems. They partner with NASA because of shared interest in basic research into future tilt rotor technology. We may be looking at different missions for different vehicles, but as we drill down into the technology needs, they become common. And so we can work very closely with the Army on some very fundamental and basic research areas. As part of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Aviation and Missile Center's joint multi-role technology demonstrator program, private companies like Bell created a tilt rotor concept demonstrator aircraft, the V-280 Valor. Officials said the JMRTD program office informs the requirements for the future vertical lift program of record and has provided significant funding for the fabrication of tracks. Where that benefits the future warfighter is that allows us to push the technology faster, farther, so that they will have a tilt rotor aircraft that is significantly improved over the V-22 aircraft. In addition to higher speeds, Army researchers said they are confident that advances in tilt rotor design will save lives. What we do is kind of like the building blocks to what would eventually become future vertical lift aircraft. One of the biggest impacts might be on how the Army operates because a lot of bases are staged around the range of their aircraft and how fast they can get to the front line and also to save soldiers' lives. Because the faster you can fly, the faster you can get somebody off the battlefield and into the hospital and that could potentially save their life. Researchers said the TrASS program will provide critical experimental data to enable the validation of existing engineering analysis tools and the development of new and improved analysis tools. There's a lot of things that we do are very advanced and we're always looking 20 years out into the future in terms of the technologies that we're trying to develop. But it's very rewarding when we can make good things happen and we know we've developed a viable technology for the Army.