
Bell XV-15 TRRA (Tilt Rotor Research Aircraft), Ship 2. This is the second of the two XV-15s built by Bell under a joint NASA/US Army program. It served from 1979 through 2003, demonstrating operations under a wide range of conditions and logged 700 hours in testing. Its success encouraged Bell and the US Marine Corps to develop a scaled-up Tilt Rotor, the MV-22, as a replacement for Marine transport helicopters. The photo was taken on Sept. 1, 2025, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, by Mike Hirschberg. CC BY-SA 4.0
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
To use all the features of this site you must be logged in. If you are a VFS member and would like an account, please contact us.