A publicity photo of the BAT (Bell Advanced Tiltrotor), a circa 1984 concept for a one-man attack tiltrotor to complete in the Army scout helicopter program (LHX – Light Helicopter Experimental) that led to the abortive RAH-66 Comanche. Shown here is a full-scale mockup; the prop-rotors as shown are substantially chopped down from the length they’d be on the actual aircraft. The BAT would have outperformed all other competitors except for hover performance; but the Army did not want a fixed-wing vehicle, so the BAT did not progress very far in the competition.
You can download a 3 megabyte JPG file of the artwork; the link is HERE. To access it, you will need to enter a username and password. The username: the first word in the body of the text on page 6 of APR issue V1N3. The password: the first word in the body of the text on page 23 of the same issue. Note that both are case sensitive.
