The XV-15 Tilt-Rotor aircraft was designed by Bell Aircraft in the mid-1970s under a contract with NASA and the U.S. Army. It was capable of taking off and landing vertically like a helicopter and of flying horizontally when its "prop rotors" were rotated forward and downward. NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA, and the Army's Air Mobility Laboratory cooperated in a program to obtain two of the aircraft for flight research.

The first aircraft arrived at Ames on March 23, 1978. After wind-tunnel testing in Ames' 40-by-80-foot wind tunnel , the aircraft began its contractor flight tests at Ames on April 23, 1979. Bell, Army, and U.S. Marine pilots flew it on 140 separate missions over the next year before turning the aircraft over to Ames. That center, in turn, chose to perform the initial flight research at the Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, CA, where aircraft number two began flight research with Dryden pilots on October 3, 1980, followed by aircraft number one (previously the wind-tunnel model) the following year.

Service pilots continued to fly the aircraft, including missions at Fort Huachuca, AZ, and aboard the Navy's USS Tripoli. Ames pilots also flew the XV-15 extensively during its lengthy period of flight research. The Ames flight research team finally returned aircraft number two to Bell Helicopter in April 1994. The successful flight research with the XV-15, spearheaded by the team at Ames, led to the military's V-22 Osprey and to the possibility of using tilt-rotor aircraft as a solution to the problem of crowded airports and highways.

The XV-15 weighed 9,076 pounds empty and measured slightly more than 46 feet in length. The distance from the ground to the top of the tail was nearly 13 feet, and the span of its forward-swept wings was about 32 feet. It featured two three-bladed rotors, each measuring 25 feet in diameter.

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