Podcast: Why Heli-Expo Has Gone Vertical

Guy Norris: Hello and welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast. I'm Guy Norris. You may have heard me on this podcast last week at the Singapore Air Show. Well, I've flown straight from Singapore to the Heli-Expo show here in Anaheim, California. And I'm here of course with my Aviation Week colleague and London Bureau Chief and rotorcraft specialist, more importantly, Tony Osborne. Tony, here we are back in California.

Tony Osborne: Yes, jet-lagged. And you came the wrong way around the world as well.

Guy Norris: I did. Rather stupidly came via London and 26 hours later here I am.

Tony Osborne: Yeah, I think we're both sort of a bit, it's the end of the first day, which is always the longest day because Airbus always hold a press conference at 7:00 AM in the morning just to really get us going. And the day is just finished and it's now 8:00 PM.

Guy Norris: Right. So, dear listeners, forgive us, but we're going to give it our best shot. So obviously the thing about the show this year is it's incredibly busy, of course. I was really struck by that.

Tony Osborne: Yes. It's probably one of the busiest ones I've seen for quite a long time. I think if you look back at the last few years, particularly since COVID, and actually since about 2015, the rotorcraft market has been in something of a doldrum really, particularly with offshore, really not happening in terms of offshore market. That's where the big helicopters are sold. But this time it's a busy show and there seems to be a lot of cheeriness. Things seem to be returning to normal despite various challenges being faced by the manufacturers.

Guy Norris: Yes, absolutely. I think we should really start off by saying that one of the key things that's happening or happened here at the show on day one was that the Helicopter Association International, which really is the founding father really, Heli-Expo is their annual show. They were founded originally in 1948, not as HAI, but as the, I think, Helicopter Council. But either way, they announced a sort of pretty monumental announcement here, a big change. They're now going to be not HAI, but VAI, which stands for...

Tony Osborne: Vertical Aviation International. Now it seems like a minor change, but it's quite significant. It represents a whole new era in the way we're thinking about vertical flight.

Guy Norris: Exactly. And the whole idea is really to embrace the revolution that we've seen in the last sort of decade, at least certainly the last five years even, towards eVTOLs and distributed propulsion, UAVs really getting bigger and more amazing and really this whole area, as you say, a vertical lift.

Tony Osborne: And we should also point out that the actual show will now be known as Verticon rather than Heli-Expo. So it sort of sounds like a name of a transformer from, if you remember the TV series.

Guy Norris: Yeah, that's right. It's going to be much more sexy-named these days, I think.

Tony Osborne: I'm not sure it's quite as a catchy name. I think Heli-Expo sort of rolls off the tongue. Verticon needs a little bit of a-

Guy Norris: Verticon, yeah. I mean it sounds a bit like one of those, in San Diego, the Comic-Con sort of... I don't know, it's kind of got that edge to it. But it certainly does, as you say, really signal the beginning of a new era in this whole industry. And I think they're obviously embracing that. I mean, it's one part of a five-point strategy, which you can read about more details in our reporting, but essentially it's part of this idea of being inclusive and embracing all aspects of vertical lift.

Tony Osborne: But it's sort of a pity because it means that the whole helicopter side of things begins to lose its favor. I mean, actually there are still not that many eVTOLs in the show.

Guy Norris: I was just going to say that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they've painstakingly pointed out that helicopters still remain the core of what they're doing and don't be afraid and all that sort of thing. But you're absolutely right in terms of eVTOLs, there's the Wisk of course, on the show floor, but really apart from that, there's less eVTOL activity here on display than previous shows.

Tony Osborne: No, I think that's very true. I mean, there are now dedicated eVTOL shows. I think Aviation Week runs one or at least has done. It's interesting. I'm not sure. It's moving in the right direction perhaps if you want to start attracting those companies, but I still think that the whole helicopter culture of it, I mean, this is very much a show that attracts, I hate to call them these, but the mom and pop helicopter-

Guy Norris: Absolutely.

Tony Osborne: The guys who have one or two helicopters in their stable, they're doing some aerial work or tourist flying, they're here to talk about new helicopters. They're here to meet up with their friends. It's a big social event for the helicopter industry. Whereas the eVTOL's a much more corporate business-

Guy Norris: VC funded and-

Tony Osborne: Exactly. And I'm not sure it's quite the flavor they're trying to capture here, but time will tell.

Guy Norris: Yeah, time will tell. But you're right. Yeah, it's all the suppliers to the industry and you see all sorts, don't you? And you don't see them anywhere else.

Tony Osborne: Absolutely.

Guy Norris: So, let's hope it doesn't chase them away. Anyway, I'm sure it won't. Talking of new shapes in the sky kind of thing, one of the things that if this show had been in about a month's time, maybe the headlining might've been the first flights of some new aircraft.

Tony Osborne: That's right. So in the coming weeks, we expect to see the first flights of the European Union Clean Sky 2 Fast Rotorcraft Demonstrators. So that's the next-generation civil tiltrotor technology demonstrator, something of a mouthful, that was developed by Leonardo helicopters. If you look at the latest edition of the magazine, you'll see a picture of it in there looking really quite advanced, still in the hangar and still being assembled, but getting pretty close to flight and getting closer every day according to the engineers working on it.

And then there's also the Airbus Racer, we'll give its shortened name, which is, it's compound aircraft with the box wing, propellers at the end of those box wings to enhance its speed out to sort of 220 knots. And that will fly very shortly as well. And Airbus has actually showed several journalists a couple of weeks ago, you may have seen our reporting on it, that it was in the final stages of flight. So we'll see those pretty soon. But then of course, today-

Guy Norris: Yes, today, thank you for queuing me up on that. Sikorsky unveiled, or at least revealed the concept art for the HEX, which is their Hybrid-Electric Demonstrator. It's a tilt-wing vehicle. It's going to have a 30-foot span, and it's sort of representative really, of a whole bunch of technologies, which will sort of open the design space really for potential follow-on families really, if you like, new-generation vehicles. This one is sized to represent around the size of an S-76. It's got around the same spot factor. So that's sort of the starting point. It's not going to be piloted, it's not even optionally piloted. They decided that was the best way to just go ahead and get the technology airborne. They're building two full-scale demonstrators and a flying test bed, the sort of flying bedstead type rig as part of this program aimed for the '26/'27 timeframe. Yeah, so the HEX is an interesting thing.

GE Aerospace is going to provide the propulsion package, really, and I think what they're saying is that because it's a tilt-wing, they're really going to be bringing the best together of the fixed wing capability with the control aspects of a rotorcraft, because these aren't going to be propellers on a wing. These are going to be rotors on a wing. And the control aspects of that is all in the rotor control, the rotor technology. And of course it will be fundamentally controlled by Sikorsky's MATRIX system, which, if you've been reading any of the stuff that particularly our colleague Graham Warwick has been writing, will just tell you all you need to know about future of autonomy really.

Tony Osborne: That's just seriously impressive tech. It sort of reminds me, I can't remember the name of it. Was it the Canadair tilt-wing that flew in the 1960s?

Guy Norris: CL-84, was it? Sorry.

Tony Osborne: I'm sure our listeners will-

Guy Norris: Be all screaming at us now going, "No! No!" And of course the difference with that was that it was a turboprop maker fixing turboprops to a moving wing, and they had to have a pitch control mechanism by a separate tail-mounted prop. And of course this wouldn't have that. And the reason they wouldn't have that is because they're using a rotor system rather than a prop system. So they're able to control a lot of that pitch through the rotor cleverly. So yeah, very interesting. And maybe in a decade from now, whatever, that's what you might be seeing out here on the static.

Tony Osborne: Of course as part of it, I think it's a new set of pillars of research that Sikorsky is now exploring. Obviously Sikorsky has been doing a lot of work around, I think we previously mentioned autonomy technologies and so on. So I think this is going to be the next step in their work.

Guy Norris: It is. And of course it also sort of fits in with the family of UAS work that they're looking at with Blown Rotor Wing technologies. It's all very much tied together. And even the GE aspect of it, I mean, will use a lot of the technology being demonstrated in the NASA program, the EPFD, the electric power flight demonstrator program. So there's a lot of, all of these new technologies basically coming together in new ways, which nobody could have even foreseen. And talking of things that couldn't have been foreseen, another spurious segue, and Tony got the early jump on this story, but famously the Robinson Helicopter Company, the family owned, privately owned, which has the biggest fleet now of private civil-

Tony Osborne: 14,000 helicopters.

Guy Norris: Yeah, that's a milestone they'll pass this year, won't they?

Tony Osborne: That's right. Yeah.

Guy Norris: ... have announced-

Tony Osborne: It will be this year.

Guy Norris: Will be this year, yeah. Have announced for the first time that a non-family member, of course, famously Frank Robinson founded the company-

Tony Osborne: His son Kurt took it over.

Guy Norris: Then took over the leadership of it, and he announced today that he was stepping aside at least as the CEO and president to let the new outsider in, David Smith.

Tony Osborne: Yes. And we've met him. He's actually charming and he's got some great ideas, I think, for the company. It is quite a breath of fresh air from the, I'm not really sure how you'd describe the old way of doing things, but there is clearly change in the air with David's role.

Guy Norris: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, in fact, Kurt Robinson this afternoon described how he had all these ideas. He wants to make it a much bigger company, but he feels he's too old. He wants to hand the baton over to a younger person who's going to lead this push forward into the future. And part of it is they're going to double their workforce. And one of the interesting things was he said, "I think we want to be a family of not just one, two, and three models, the R22, 44 and 66, we want to be like a four, five and six-model company." And that's something that David Smith absolutely jumped on. He said, "Yes, we need to think about a bigger aircraft."

Tony Osborne: They're keen to embrace the technology, but at the same time, they're keen for a aircraft that is robust and easily repairable, which means they're not going down the eVTOL route, they're going down their traditional, conventional rotorcraft route by the sounds of it.

Guy Norris: Absolutely.

Tony Osborne: So I think that's something that they're very keen to do. They're an engineering company through and through. David is an engineer.

Guy Norris: Yeah, absolutely.

Tony Osborne: Frank's wish, I think, was always for the company to be led by an engineer just as he is.

Guy Norris: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's... So look out for the, dare I say, R88.

Tony Osborne: Yeah, I put that number to him and he didn't say no. But, again, time will tell. It's still early days.

Guy Norris: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, another thing, going back to the more traditional makers, is Sikorsky, we're going back to Sikorsky, not to the futuristic versions, but to current helicopters. And Tony, you've got a story.

Tony Osborne: Well, some say that maybe the HEX stuff might have been a little bit of a deflection from some of the actual broader issues with their commercial products. I mean, Sikorsky now really only has two commercial products. That's the S-92, their famous city bus, which has become famous obviously for its operations offshore serving the oil and gas market. And then you've got the S-76, which actually is no longer really in production or they are trying to find a future for that. But the big problem at the moment is the S-92. What's happened is that the oil and gas market has, a bit like post COVID when the airlines came back, everyone wanted to fly, go on holiday. And so the airlines came back and the capacity wasn't there, all the security systems at the airports were failing. There wasn't enough baggage handlers and so on.

Now the oil and gas industry is coming back significantly. The utilization of the S-76 has skyrocketed. But the challenge is that that's happened so quickly that Sikorsky just simply has not been prepared for it. So spare parts or spare main gearboxes are not being maintained quick enough. They're not being turned around fast enough. And the operators, companies like Bristow, these are big name operators, CHC, Bristow, PHI are finding increasing numbers of their S-92s on the ground. And these aircraft are critical to the offshore business. I mean, they're the 19-seaters. They can go a long way. If you don't have them, then one mission needs to be done by two aircraft, say, like a super medium.

Guy Norris: Yeah, the workhorses, right?

Tony Osborne: Yeah. So these aircraft are workhorses, they are sweated every day. They're some of the busiest aircraft and suddenly they're not available. And it's understood, around 10% of the global S-92 fleet is now on the ground. In fact, I've heard today that there are now fewer S-92s in service than at any other time in the past five or six years because of these supply chain issues.

Now, Sikorsky says they are on top of them, they are working towards them. But there are those in the offshore industry that have their doubts really about Sikorsky's move towards keeping the commercial business. i.e. Lockheed Martin wanted that company for Black Hawk production and CH-53K. And the commercial business is a 10th of Sikorsky's business. And if Sikorsky is one 10th of Lockheed Martin, then the commercial business of Sikorsky's one 100th. And so there are some companies that have their doubts about the future of this business within Sikorsky. I think Sikorsky would say otherwise and they deliberately said that that's not the case. But I think until these problems are resolved and resolved more speedily, there are going to be those lingering doubts.

Guy Norris: Yeah, you're right. They've gone to great pains today to, A, prove that they're in the civil side for the long haul. And they kind of weirdly, well, not weirdly, but they're sort of saying, "We're certainly backing the 92 all the way," because they're just this year delivering the final batch of aircraft for the US presidential fleet, the VH-92. So they're sort of saying that's a standard really, that they've got the gold standard that they've got to maintain, so they feel fully committed to the aircraft. But additionally, they know, they're all fully aware of the situation with the offshore market. And their plan is by the end of this year, beginning of next to be on top of it and back to where they were pre COVID and that sort of thing. But of course, the market, as you said, has risen up out of nowhere.

Tony Osborne: Absolutely. And this is the challenge they're facing. The issue is creating a break on their growth. And these are companies that really badly needed growth. I mean, some of them have been through bankruptcies in the last few years and they're coming back and now they're finding that this growth is being held up by this aircraft and they're now seeking to buy other platforms like the so-called super mediums. These are aircraft like the Airbus H175 and the Leonardo AW189. And we've actually already seen some orders. Today Bristow ordered 10 firm orders and 10 options for the AW189 in particular. And I suspect we're going to see some more orders for these aircraft in the next few days before the show ends.

Guy Norris: Right. Okay. Yes. And of course we should say there is still another-

Tony Osborne: Two days.

Guy Norris: ... two days to go while we're recording this. We don't have the full picture yet. But one of the things, of course, you have sort of the elephant in the room when it comes to the future of offshore aircraft is the Bell 525, which is still yet to be certified. But I think finally it seems that that seems to be on the verge.

Tony Osborne: Yes, Bell is saying that they're in the final cusp of testing for their FAA certification. They're going to start rolling aircraft off the production line later this year. Obviously, very much depends on the sign-off from the FAA. I mean, this is a very advanced aircraft, first commercial fly-by-wire aircraft, I should say. But the challenge is, is whether they can get this into the market quickly, will someone be willing to adopt the aircraft? I mean, there's always the saying about never operate the A model of anything. Will customers really want to take on that risk when they already have mature aircraft in service? Bell has something of an uphill struggle. They could also be timing it just right for this spurt in the offshore industry. If they can get aircraft out there, it's quite possible that they might find some rapid success. It all really depends on the pricing. And the pricing is quite significant we understand for this particular aircraft compared to its competitors.

Guy Norris: Well, who knows, they could be doing the most successful end run around the market by pure happenstance. But anyway, I think that's about a wrap for this week's Check 6 Podcast. Thanks very much, Tony, and been great working with you this week.

Tony Osborne: Thank you, Guy.

Guy Norris: Special thanks to our podcast producer in London, Guy Ferneyhough. And to our listeners, thank you for your time. Join us again next week on your commute or wherever you're listening to this for another Check 6 Podcast. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.