Marenco Swisshelicopter will sign a letter of intent with Canada’s Horizon Helicopters for one SKYe SH09 here at Heli-Expo 2016. Whitehorse, Yukon-based Horizon specializes in mining support, firefighting and mountain operations. This is the third helicopter sale for Marenco in Canada. Marenco also announced a second letter of intent from existing customer Rotorworld, which placed its first order in 2014. The second SH09 will be based in Costa Rica.
Marenco brought the full-scale mockup of the SH09 light single to its Heli-Expo booth (3006). The new helicopter’s development schedule has slipped, and EASA certification is now expected next year. As of early February, flight testing was scheduled to resume before the Heli-Expo show.
“We are moving from developing a helicopter to creating all the processes we need to make sure we get the quality right, such as obtaining production organization approval,” CEO Martin Stucki told AIN. The company has grown to more than 100 employees. An additional 30 or so experts, outside Marenco, work on the project.
The first flight of the second prototype (P2) was pegged for the second half of February. “I wish we had done it earlier, but sometimes you are not in control of everything,” Stucki said. As of early February, ground testing had begun. Two test pilots are involved in the program.
P2 will open the flight envelope. P1, which first flew in October 2014, has not gone beyond translational speed (i.e. 15 knots) in more than 40 test hours. As for altitude, initial certification will go up to 13,000 feet, for flight in the Alps, Stucki explained. A certification upgrade will then raise the altitude to 25,000 feet, he added.
A third prototype, P3, will also be part of the certification program, which is expected to total several hundred flight hours. P3 will help determine the final changes on the aircraft before it reaches the production standard.
Stucki denied that the rotor head has been entirely redesigned, as suggested earlier. “We changed the concept a little bit,” he said. The new rotor head will first fly on P2 and then, “most probably,” be retrofitted on to P1. No major design changes were done on P2, according to Stucki, but small ones include replacing control push-pull cables with rods.
Last fall, EASA certification was still scheduled for “between June and October 2016.” It is now planned for 2017, followed by FAA validation approximately one year later. “We have enough funding until the first delivery,” Stucki said.
With a 5,842-pound mtow, the SH09 is designed to carry one pilot and seven passengers, which positions it at the higher end of the single-engine helicopter segment. Features include a composite-material airframe and a 1,020-shp Honeywell HTS900 turboshaft. Preliminary data indicates 140 knots at high speed cruise, 430 nm range and five hours of endurance. Sling load capability is expected to be 3,300 pounds.
On-condition maintenance for gearboxes, rotor blades and the engine will be another strong point, chief commercial officer Mathias Sénès told AIN.
The SH09's main competitors are the Bell 407, the Finmeccanica AW119 and the Airbus H125 and H130, according to Sénès. Dual hydraulic and electric systems will be standard on the SH09, which he expects will be a differentiator. These redundancies will become important as the market grows for single-engine IFR operations, he explained.
As of early February, the company had received letters of intent from about 45 customers for a combined 72 helicopters. The first deliveries are expected to take place immediately after certification in 2017. The supply chain will have been activated and final assembly of a few aircraft will have started prior to certification, Sénès said.
Marenco is already organizing customer support operations. With European customers that will receive their SH09s first, Marenco plans to test a fast-delivery process for spare parts.