Curtiss-Wright proposed the Model 90 to the US Army for the AAFSS (Armed Aerial Fire Support System) contest circa 1965. The Model 90 was derived from X-19 design concepts, and was a VTOL vehicle that used four tilting prop-rotors for both VTOL and forward thrust. The Model 90 lost out to the Lockheed design, which became the AH-56 Cheyenne. It’s interesting to speculate how the USAF would have reacted had the Army selected the Model 90… it was, after all, a fixed-wing combat aircraft, and by this point the US Army was not supposed to have such things.
You can download a 5 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 3 of APR issue V2N4. The password: the first word in the body of the text on page 5 of the same issue. Note that both are case sensitive.
Scott,
All I see when I enter the site is the dreaded “red X” image. Is this image compatible with Win XP?
Paul
Should be. However, the image is fairly big… might be too big for some browsers. I’d suggest, once you’ve logged in, back off back to this post and then save the image via right click/”save as.” Save it to your hard drive, then view it with a regular image viewing program rather than the web browser.
Hehe, greetings from the Alien 2 Movie Dropship….
One question on understanding how to download:
I have to purchase the APR issue to be able to download the artwork file? So it is not for free (as stated in the e-mail)?
Best regards
HJ
If you own the issue, then you can download the artwork for free. There will eventually be fore more bits of downloadable goodies than issues of APR.
How the USAF would have reacted to the Model 90 is easy to imagine, the same as they reacted to the AH-56 once Army said it could be used for other than helicopter escort, and especially when they said that with the pusher in beta it could dive bomb: they would lobby and work feverishly to kill it. As many opined at the time, and as the late Jeff Ethell said on the record, one of the strongest motivators for USAF to bring the AX (A-10) to fruition was to kill the AH-56. At the time USAF openly argued that there was no need for the AH-56 since the new AX would do a much better job.
It’s worthy of note that when Army canceled Cheyenne on their own USAF seemed to lose interest in the A-10 and treated it pretty much as a stepchild until Gulf War 1, which came along just after USAF had announced plans to retire most of the A-10 fleet except for some to be used as FAC birds. They planned to replace them with more F-16s
Another fine aircraft we won’t see in action
There is some other (uncredited) artwork of the aircraft on the cover of ‘Meccano Magazine’, dated August 1965. You can download it here: https://www.meccanoindex.co.uk/MMpdfs1.php
The cover art in the August 65 “Meccano” isn’t of the Model 90, but of an armed X-19. And inside the cover it calls the cover art an XV/5A. And the issue includes what is hands down the least accurate Saturn V cutaway I’ve ever seen.