Hill Helicopters has surpassed 1,000 orders and secured a flight operations facility at the Halfpenny Green Airport at Wolverhampton, UK, and will soon begin ground testing of its proprietary GT50 turbine engine. CEO Jason Hill reported these developments yesterday during an in-person product reveal and live-streamed event showcasing non-flying examples of wheeled and skid gear versions of its HX50 kit helicopter at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.
Hill also announced significantly discounted pricing over the next week and said it would make the certified version of the helicopter, the HC50, available to the general public. Heretofore, the HC50 was only available to HX50 position holders.
As of December 1, its order book stood at 975—789 HX50s and 186 HC50s—and a company spokesman told AIN that the company crossed the 1,000 threshold soon after yesterday's event concluded. The HX50 has a base price of $747,000 and the HC50 retails at $910,210. However, the limited-time promotion, good through next Monday, offers new depositors those aircraft at a substantial discount—$784,600 for the HC50 ($721,890 for customers already holding HX50 positions) and $673,000 for the HX50.
Jason Hill maintains that the company can offer the aircraft at those price points due to its extensive manufacturing vertical integration, including developing and building the GT50 engine.
“Traditionally, these [helicopter] components would have been astronomically expensive,” he said. “This really talks to our vertical integration strategy, the pain that we've been going through over the last couple of years developing the processes to make gears, bearings, and flight-critical components so that I have end-to-end control of the costs. We can do that now and we can make these parts to the price we say.”
Hill also said the company was working with insurers and finance companies to reduce costs for its operators.