The Bell 525 “super medium” twin is getting closer to its first flight, having been delayed by a few months due in the main to supply chain issues, Bell Helicopter president and CEO John Garrison said here on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Bell 505 JetRanger X light single and V-280 tiltrotor programs are progressing towards certification and prototype manufacturing, respectively. Technical progress is taking place against the backdrop of an overall soft market.
Ground testing of the first 525–which will be the world’s first commercial fly-by-wire rotorcraft in service–is going on and Bell is planning to have three aircraft flying by year-end. The entire development program is to involve five helicopters.
Early last year, Bell was still hoping to fly the 525 by December 2014. “What has paced the program is the supply chain,” Garrison explained. He added that conformity inspections have involved a lot of work, too, as engineers want to ensure some aspects of the prototype are conforming, which will accelerate certification. The Textron company has received 60 letters of intent for the 525, many of them for offshore oil-and-gas operations.
Two Bell 505 JetRanger Xs are flying and have accumulated a combined 180 hours. High-altitude testing will take place this week in Colorado. The 505 will first receive a Transport Canada certification, which will be validated by the FAA and EASA. Letters of intent now total 350 and the construction of the Lafayette, Louisiana, factory is almost complete, Garrison said.
In the civil business, oil-and-gas applications only account for “10-15 percent of our revenues,” Garrison said. However, the current weak market in offshore oil-and-gas is impacting oil-based economies and is thus a contributing factor to soft sales globally, he added.
The military V-280 Valor is the third major development at Bell. Fuselage assembly has begun and critical design reviews are said to be on track. The first flight is slated for the first quarter of 2018. Sister company TRU Simulation+Training has built a simulator that is being used for marketing purposes around the world, Garrison said. He emphasized a high degree of realism, as the control logic is an evolution of the login used on the V-22 tiltrotor and Bell 525.