Next Kopter To Fly in July

The third Kopter SH09 single-engine prototype, aircraft P3, likely will fly in July following a three-month schedule delay triggered by a supplier problem. “It was a conscious decision,” Kopter chief technology officer Michele Riccobono told AIN in late May. “We discovered a quality issue with a dynamic system component from a supplier that failed our incoming inspection test.” 

Riccobono said the other two Kopter prototypes have completed their flight testing and that P2 is being retained for ground testing of the drive system. Flight tests of P3 will initially be conducted in Sicily. Riccobono said the first few flight hours would be devoted to flight envelope expansion and investigation and handling, development testing, and a few certification tests. He said the majority of the certification testing would be handled by the first fully representative production aircraft, PS4, scheduled to join the test fleet in the third quarter of 2018 and fly into 2019. “We wanted to push the first flight of PS4 a little bit to the right to benefit from the initial flights of P3. If there are some last-minute changes we want to put into PS4 we will have the time to do it,” he said. Riccobono added that the company took advantage of  P3's first flight delay to further refine PS4.   

The company also continued all of its non-flight development, test and certification activity which included ground/bench testing components, systems, and subsystems including the gearbox and main rotor hub, conducting all of the fatigue tests required by EASA to get P3 in the air, and implementing design improvements on PS4. Riccobono said that the company also is building a full-scale avionics system integration rig that will house the components of the new Garmin G3000H touchscreen avionics system. Garmin announced in May that Kopter would be an initial customer for the new G3000H (see article on page XX), which brings IFR glass panel sophistication and capabilities to Part 27 helicopters.

“We have asked Honeywell [supplier of the HTS900 engine] to provide a Fadec connected to the engine simulator so that we can integrate the avionics to the engine which is one of the high-risk items. Whenever you integrate the engine to the avionics you always find issues. Thanks to this fully representative engine simulator we can mitigate much of the risk well ahead of putting this system on PS4,” he said. “On a components system testing level, we are on a good track.” 

Riccobono said the company is gearing up for certification and customer deliveries next year, even as it completes its flight test program. “We are in parallel ramping up the production line. The idea is to start the build-up of PS4 together with the [customer] civil aircraft. Our target is to establish single-digit deliveries in 2019. To do that we need to parallelize things. While we are completing certification we will already have the first few production aircraft in the pipeline,” he said.  

Kopter's order book for the $3.5 million all-composite helicopter currently stands at more than 120, which a company spokesman told AIN represents the first three years of production. The company currently employs 260, 150 of whom are working in engineering, development, testing, and design.