Bell Completes 525 Flight Testing, Lands Offshore Evaluation In Guyana

DALLAS–Bell has completed flight testing of its 525 Relentless super-medium fly-by-wire rotorcraft and is in the final stages of readying the aircraft for market.

While unable to provide detailed timelines for the rotorcraft’s long-awaited certification, the airframer says it also managed to secure additional offshore interest in the aircraft from Portugal’s Omni Helicopters International, which plans to perform an operational evaluation in Guyana.

Some 500 hr. of flying will take place over six months as part of the Guyana trials, which are scheduled to begin in the latter half of the year, Bell Chief Commercial Officer Danny Maldonado told journalists on the eve of Vertical Aviation International’s (VAI) Verticon exhibition here on March 10.

Bell said the trials will see the aircraft loaded to representative mission weights and integrated into the daily flight planning processes and flight schedule. The aircraft will visit multiple offshore installations in the region and will be routinely loaded, unloaded and refueled to subject it to a sustained trial under actual field conditions.

Interest from Omni comes following the order for 10 525s placed by Norway’s state-owned oil and gas company Equinor this time last year.

The Guyana plans, which require certification, hint at where the company hopes to be by midyear. More details about the trials are expected this week.

Ahead of certification, Bell needs to fly 150 hr. as part of the FAA’s mandated function and reliability (F&R) trials, using an aircraft that the manufacturer has already configured and made ready for testing. Also supporting the effort will be the company’s systems integration labs, with tests on human factors in the avionics and trials that will deliberately inject failures into the flight control system, Bell’s 525 program head, Mike Deslatte, explained.

He said there was a “robust plan” to complete the F&R tests and that the company has a “strong path forward” toward service entry.

In 2024 Bell completed more than 60 certification deliverables with the FAA and several critical TIA (Type Inspection Authorization) flight tests.

Three aircraft are currently devoted to flight testing. One will do the F&R trials and two aircraft are currently dedicated to cold weather trials. One is flying in Alaska, while a second is supporting the development of a full icing system in Michigan. The full icing system will be introduced after initial type certification, Deslatte says.

“We have closed out so many things with respect to the initial type certification that two-thirds of our flight test campaign is fully dedicated at this point to post-type certificate activities,” Deslatte said. To get the aircraft into service with Equinor, the aircraft will need to secure certification with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which has bilateral agreements with the FAA on certifications.

Bell “reinvigorated” its engagement with EASA last October, Deslatte notes, and said the company would have a “good idea” of what additional work will be needed to secure EASA certification later this year. Furthermore, Equinor demands call for a certain number of flight hours to have been flown post-certification before deliveries can get underway. Equinor is planning for the first 525s to be delivered to Norway by the end of 2026 ahead of first offshore operations in 2027. Bell sees S-92 replacements as the biggest addressable market for the 525.

The latest milestones come 13 years since the 525’s program launch and nine years since the first flight. Development has taken much longer than expected because the aircraft is the first commercial helicopter to incorporate a fly-by-wire flight control system. Further delays were caused by the loss of the first prototype in July 2016, which halted flight tests for a full year, in addition to later disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.