Robinson Preps Torrance Factory for R88 Production

Unveiled last year at Verticon, the R88 is Robinson’s largest helicopter, capable of carrying 10 occupants, with a 275-cu-ft cabin for up to eight passengers or 1,800 pounds of payload with full fuel. Power is provided by a 1,000-shp Safran Helicopter Engines Arriel 2W. Certification and entry into service are expected to take place later this decade, and the R88 will sell for about $3.3 million.

A key element of the R88 design is the input drive shaft, which connects the engine to the main transmission. “Input drive shafts are really tricky. That’s one of the hardest challenges on any helicopter, the ability to take relative motion between gear boxes and engines and throughout all sorts of maneuvers and transients,” Robinson Helicopter president and CEO David Smith told AIN.

Rather than adopt a conventional design, such as the Kamatics KAflex that Smith’s former employer, Bell, uses in many of its helicopters, he wanted something less expensive that doesn’t require the complex overhaul process associated with a proprietary product. “It’s a fine product, but we want a different solution,” he said.

“The technology that we’re using for our input drive shaft is such an interesting improvement over the products that our competitors have used. Because we in the industry go to these single-source operators that control the aftermarket and specialty intellectual property, we avoided all of that with this design, and it works really well. We’re hundreds of hours into testing, full speed, full power, and it’s working like a champ. I think we’ve got something good that’s going to cut the cost probably in half, maybe a third, for the competing product. This is going to be a design that operates well and doesn't require an obscene overhaul cost.”

Also helping manage costs is further vertical integration, down to making its own fasteners for certain hard-to-source applications, more use of robotics for repetitive work like sanding rotor blades, and putting five-axis milling machines to work making hydraulic components that Robinson used to purchase from vendors. “That accelerates our iterations through the design cycle and gets the parts in test sooner, and allows us to then make the next iteration on the design,” Smith said.

A new, larger water-jet machine will be used for cutting R88 sheetmetal parts, including rotor blade skins for blades that are three feet longer than the R66’s. Repetitive tasks such as machining, welding, and sanding are being augmented by dedicated robotic centers, Smith explained, “all areas where we have high injury risk and repetitive motion injury risk.”

The idea isn’t to replace workers but deploy them to more important work, like the final sanding of rotor blade bond lines that can’t be done precisely enough by machines. “There’s about 20% of the blade they can’t do with robotics,” he said. “The resolution of their movement isn’t sufficient to do some of the most critical bond-line sanding.”

An in-house team developed a robotic process for manufacturing blade weights that eliminated a significant amount of labor. “We tried working with third-party integrators for this stuff,” Smith said, “and they failed us.

"The guys have been really incredible because they learned to code the robot. This is stuff that I would have loved to have done in my previous life, but work restrictions under the labor contracts at my previous employer made it difficult. Here, we have the flexibility to do end-to-end innovation. There’s still a lot of work for the same technician…so we’re hiring; we need probably another 75 to 100 people to do the things that are ahead of us.”

Robinson has also invested in inspection technology to speed quality-control processes. R88 cabin assembly is well underway and in testing, along with many other components such as the landing gear and aircraft systems.

“We have several reviews during the week with each system, [to] try to notice all the bottlenecks early,” he said. “We can fix, or we can change the path that we’re going through so we can deliver on time. I want the customer to know that we are doing our best to deliver them a product that they’re going to be happy with, and we’re not going to cut any corners.”