Bell Relentlessly Pursuing FAA Certification for 525

Making his Verticon debut as Bell Textron’s president and CEO, Danny Maldonado outlined his company’s successes in 2025 while also acknowledging that the super-medium-twin Bell 525 Relentless once again eluded FAA certification.

“We delivered 169 helicopters last year, with 10,000 Bells now in service,” he told the media on Monday at the show. “We also ramped up our aftermarket [support] and our investment in our people, our facilities, and our products; accelerated the MV75 program; and celebrated the advancement to Phase 3 of the Army’s Flight School Next program.”

He also noted that Bell faced “primitive challenges in 2025—that is, tariffs, government shutdowns, and supply-chain issues. But our team did a fantastic job of working through all those challenges and still delivering on all our commitments to our customers.”

While Maldonado said the Bell 525 program made progress last year, “We didn’t get the [helicopter] FAA certified in 2025. However, we continue to make progress with our flight activities and customers.”

Bell 525 program senior v-p Michael Deslatte added that the company’s objective is to certify the fly-by-wire helicopter by year-end, without giving any promise of that timeline but noting that all flight testing has been completed for the FAA. “When we introduced the 525, our goal was crystal clear: to deliver a super-medium helicopter that sets a new benchmark for safety, performance, and mission capability. That vision has not changed.

“You’ll notice this year when the show opens [today] that the 525 is not in our booth, and that’s by design. Every one of our [test 525s] are out in the field, hard at work preparing us for market entry. Our team remains focused on critical activities necessary for certification.”

Last year at Verticon, Bell said it was engaged with the FAA on the type certification process. Since then, Deslatte said, “We continue to be in lockstep with the FAA on these final efforts towards certification.” The only open certification activities for the 525 are failure-mode regression and fly-by-wire software validation at Bell’s integration test lab.

Two of the three flight-test Bell 525s are conducting post-certification flying activities—namely, cold-weather expansion and full icing capability—in Yellowknife, Canada, and Marquette, Michigan. “Since the fall, these two teams have been…focused on anti-ice performance, along with increased gross weight cold weather testing,” Deslatte noted. “Together, these teams have flown hundreds of hours and accomplished thousands of test points in austere conditions and are gearing up for type inspection authorization with the FAA next season.”

The third test aircraft is “ready and waiting” to begin function and reliability testing with the FAA once “prerequisite activities” are completed, according to Deslatte.

Meanwhile, two pilots from Omni Helicopters became the first customer pilots to log time in the new helicopter after completing a four-day familiarization course with the Bell Training Academy. This included eight hours in the level-C Bell 525 simulator and three days of instructional courses.