Boeing just posted this video of its Phantom Swift X-Plane prototype that was designed and built in less than a month.Using rapid prototyping, the Boeing Phantom Works engineers in Philadelphia designed and built a flying subscale model of the innovative Phantom Swift in less than 30 days to be part of Boeing’s proposal for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) vertical takeoff and landing X-Plane competition.
Source: YouTube
.. another DARPA funded VTOL hybrid concept failure
To have something like that flying after only 30 days of development is impressive. I would expect it to be shaky considering the development window. I don’t think the point of this video is how well it flies, rather, it shows how quickly prototypes can be designed/built to validate analysis / simulation.
If we gave up at the first sign of a challenge we would never make any progress. It still got off the ground and proved the configuration works for hover.
I will be interested to see their progress over the next few months.