Hill Helicopters has surpassed 1,000 orders, will operate a flight operations center at the Halfpenny Green Airport at Wolverhampton, and is slated to begin ground testing of its proprietary GT50 turbine engine shortly. CEO Jason Hill reported these developments during an in-person product reveal and live-streaming event showcasing non-flying examples of wheeled and skid gear versions of its HX50 kit helicopter at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, UK, on December 6.
Hill also said it would make the certified version of the helicopter, the HC50, available to the general public. Until now, the HC50 was only available to HX50 position holders.
At the beginning of December, Hill reported that its order book stood at 975—789 HX50s and 186 HC50s. However, a one-week order discount program immediately following the product reveal pushed orders over the 1,000 mark. The HX50 typically has a base price of $747,000 and the HC50 retails at $910,210. However, the limited-time promotion offered 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.
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. This really talks to our vertical integration strategy and 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.”
The carbon-fiber, five-seat HX50 has performance targets of a 140-knot cruise speed, 700 nm maximum range, and 1,760 pounds of useful load. Features include leather seats, climate control, digital cockpit, two-axis autopilot, choice of retractable or skid landing gear, and a choice of colors. The fuel bladders hold 175 U.S. gallons and sit behind the rear cabin bulkhead and ahead of another bulkhead for the capacious cargo compartment, capable of carrying three full-sized rollaway bags or multiple sets of golf clubs. The GT50 engine is canted slightly downward and rests in what Hill calls a “bathtub” that extends into the ceiling of the cargo bay.
Options include in-seat electric heaters and air-conditioned seat ventilation; a refrigerated center console compartment beneath the armrest cushion to chill drinks and snacks; and a power supply for each passenger’s tablet computer with audio streamed directly to passenger headsets. The audio fully integrates with the digital cockpit and onboard audio system.
Interior Clues for Luxury Autos
Hill readily admits that the HX50 takes styling cues and cockpit features from the luxury automotive sector, including flush pop-out door handles, premium perforated leather seats, high-end interior coverings and carpets, nose insignia, brightware along the body, and even the external lighting that makes pilots and passengers alike “feel secure” and comfortable. “A lot of helicopter seats are considered to be instruments of torture,” he joked, noting that the HX50 seats are as large and comfortable as those in his Range Rover SUV. The seats are designed to accommodate helmeted or unhelmeted crew or passengers, three- or five-point restraints, and headset stowage on the seat backs.
The instrument panel features two 15.6-inch digital displays and a center mounting point for the largest iPad available to display navigation, weather, and other flight information that syncs directly with the onboard flight computer and the autopilot (a two-axis autopilot is standard and a four-axis is optional).
The small touchscreen Interactive Pilot Interface (IPI), mounted between the two pilot positions, replaces the traditional radio, audio panel, and transponder stack. The IPI incorporates a variety of convenient features including automatically listing the closest radio frequencies to the aircraft’s current GPS position. “Everything you need to input into the helicopter is available on the IPI,” Hill said. The cockpit also contains dedicated storage space for a smartphone and a charger for it.
A roof panel contains “all the controls that you don’t use that regularly while you’re conducting a normal VFR flight” including landing gear controls and steering activation (wheeled gear), rotor brake, brake release, and ELT.
The futuristic-looking gooseneck cyclic and collective both contain triggers that hold their position when released. The cyclic head is backlit and contains a variety of controls, including those for the autopilot, and the collective is fully integrated into the center console. The flight control system features conventional mechanical linkages with push-pull cables, bell cranks, and a Simplex hydraulic system with manual reversion. Startup involves powering on the avionics and following the bootup and log-on screens. The onboard computer and dedicated app manage aircraft logs and other key items.
Slick Shape
Other than its aesthetic appeal, the shape of the helicopter is designed to reduce drag in multiple areas, including the retractable landing gear, cowling, main rotor pylon, fairings, and engine inlets and exhaust. With regard to the rotor system, Hill said the design goal was to get “the mechanical stuff out of the wind.”
“Now there are a million things that we have pushed, pulled, changed, and revised and there is still a bunch of that to go on yet,” Hill said. But he emphasized that the basic shape of the helicopter would not change. “Fundamentally, it’s a tadpole with a long tail, a teardrop that pushes through the air gently and then allows the air to collect smoothly behind it as it passes through with the least disturbance,” he said.
However, beneath the smooth lines, he said the helicopter is “a simple structure, a simple mechanical layout, and a simple implementation of the blades” designed to generate “long life and reliability of service.” And, while the design of the helicopter implies cutting-edge technologies, Hill characterized the aircraft as “a greatest hits album. It’s all the things that we know and love from the helicopter industry” that are “proven concepts packaged beautifully.”
The empennage sports a curved horizontal stabilizer with fences designed to keep the ship stable in all flight regimes, including high rates of descent, and a large ducted tail rotor with large-chord blades. The latter is designed to ensure robust tail rotor authority in wind up to 35 knots in any direction and under multiple conditions—such as at maximum gross weight at 10,000 feet on an ISA +15-degree C day.
Hill also zeroed in on simplicity. “You’ve got to try and make the whole experience of flying as easy as possible.” That includes wheeled landing gear and Hill’s Helimove system, which he calls “a very simple solution to a very irritating problem” of easily moving a helicopter on the ground into hangars or parking spaces.
Electric motors are incorporated into the main landing gear, allowing the aircraft to be moved with the engine shut down and even the main rotor blades folded. It can be controlled from within the aircraft or outside of it via smartphone controls. However, the HX50 also is available with skid gear that, according to Hill, is more appropriate for cold climates, soft field operations, or up-tempo operations such as air tourism. The skids give the helicopter a slightly larger stance.
Hill’s GT50 gas turbine engine is at the heart of the aircraft and the key factor to keeping the price relatively low. Hill believes he can produce the powerplant for under $100,000 each once serial production matures. Hill said the company has spent the last two to three years mastering engine component production.
Holding Price Point
“The problem with making cost-effective jet engines isn’t about making clever shapes; it’s that, traditionally, the only people you could go to would charge you an arm and a leg. The trick is getting yourself in a position to make the parts,” Hill said. “We can do that now.”
The compact, 500-shp GT50 features a direct-drive starter generator on the front of the engine and 12 fuel nozzles around the annular combuster that “give us great atomization, great performance, great combustion efficiency that’s going to help get rid of all the exhaust,” Hill said, stressing, “This isn’t a brand-new engine. This engine is a compendium of all of the things that have been proven on lots of different engines over 70 years.
“We’ve done a good job of bringing those components together, vertically integrating the manufacturing, and using the latest certification standards, manufacturing methods, quality control, and non-destructive testing to make sure we’ve got what we need to make a reliable engine,” he said. “This is all about manufacturing. We can’t be just a technology company and push manufacturing out to a third party because you just lose control of your price point and you lose everything.”
Aside from price, “We’ve got to make flying cool again, and that is what we have done,” Hill said. “The whole design objective is to make people want to go flying again. We’ve got to make people want to learn to fly. These are the people [customers] that are used to the finest supercars in all the world, and we need to give them a reason to start flying again.”
The day before Hill crossed the 1,000-order threshold, he mused, “Who knew that having too many customers would be a problem?”