In just a matter of months, we built our entire facility and our team, everything we needed to develop HX50 and GT50. This included a precision temperature-controlled machine shop, an avionics development centre, a metrology lab, a power electronics lab, a design suite, and a development section.

We developed the capability to make aerospace quality gears and bearings, all the components for GT50, all the power electronics and software capabilities. 

However, we quickly ran out of space again, necessitating an expansion to DC2 and DC3, where we made composite patterns and moulds, infused full airframes, and eventually produced two HX50 airframes—one with wheels and the other with skids—fully fitted and ready for public display.

Eventually we ran out of space, the business was growing quickly, and it became time to step it up again.

All the staff in charge of design, development, production, approvals, and admin are now based in our brand new 76,000 sq ft facility, working with one key goal: to get the development finished and the prototypes and early series HX50 into production. These gigantic premises will become one of the elements of our modular approach to production.

This has been a huge undertaking. In pride of place in PC1 is our brand-new composites gantry mill, installed and commissioned. Ready to complete the composites wing are pattern, moulding, and laminating shops. Alongside them are the all-new paint facility and precision machine shop, now fully online.

Simultaneously, the engineering team has been developing our generation 2 fuselage ready for production, upgrading all the exterior cabin lighting, refining our renowned digital cockpit, and pushing ahead with GT50 and the turbo machinery for HX50.

In other news, our two helicopters are finally home from the US, which means they will be ready just in time for the new customer reception area to be open for tours to start for customers and prospects at the beginning of September. So, you’ll be able to come to PC1, see the helicopters, the production facilities, and development activities for yourself.

Composites Manufacturing – at the heart of our business

“To make it cost-effective you have to control every element from end to end” - Jason

The problem with vertical integration is that you are totally dependent on the reliability of your plant and equipment. If your machine fails, it stops production.

We have developed a whole suite of technologies to be able to produce cost-effective, inexpensive patterns and moulds for prototype purposes all the way through to full production grade tooling solutions. But our first gantry mill not only had issues with reliability, but was unable to keep up with the demand for new patterns and moulds, as the design iterated.

Our new gantry mill arrived from Italy in 5 articulated lorry loads. A team of engineers needed 6 weeks to build it. It is supported by a base which required a trench being excavated a metre deep. This state-of-the-art five-axis machine can produce patterns that are 4m wide, 8m long and up to 2m high. It can hold 10 microns in positional accuracy over the space of a metre.

This is a completely self-contained, modern, reliable machine, which even handles all the waste powder and dust safely. It can run 24 hours a day. It has a modern high-speed spindle, as well as an automatic 16-tool tool changer, and we have remote monitoring of the machine as well as computer controls from external stations.

It can also keep up with over 500 machines a year in terms of the finished composite part trimming, all of the glazing trimming, and other operations to make our finished composite structures the most accurate they can possibly be.

We can now make patterns and moulds faster, more precisely and more reliably than before - this gives us huge advantages. The quality of the flowing A surfaces, to give you that silky feel of the external contours of HX50, will be absolutely perfect, needing the absolute minimum of hand finishing.

This means low cost composite materials in through the front door, high quality precision aerospace patterns and moulds made in-house, production-ready at PC1.

When the finished patterns and moulds come off the gantry mill they go to the trim shop and then the laminating shop, a clean room environment that eliminates all the dust to produce high-quality laminated components. They then go across to the other side of the factory to be cured in the oven, and then back into the trim shop and over to paint to receive their finish.  

Our custom-designed paint booth is ready to meet the challenges of delivering world-class finishes on all our production aircraft.

The fibrous nature of the internals of the structure and the resin makes it difficult to create panels with a perfect glass-like paint finish.  Our purpose is therefore to develop all the elements of the surface preparation and paint application and finishing processes to a top-grade standard.

We have also built a temperature-controlled mezzanine floor which is twice the size of all of DC1. It’s huge. Here will be located our avionic shop, wiring shop, upholstery and trim section, and all the facilities we need to make the crash-worthy glazing and acrylic components for HX50.

Our suite of state-of-the-art CNC machines are now happily installed in the new precision machine   shop - all services are connected and all machines back online.

As the drivetrain, engine, flight controls, undercarriage, wiring system and avionics all continue to evolve and develop, the design of the airframe has to evolve to adapt and accept all those interfaces back to the aircraft. The generation 2 structure embodies all these changes.

For example, we’ve developed a new tooling strategy that allows us to do much more work on open tools.  All the enhancements that have been developed over the last couple of years are now being captured in this next version of tooling which will be used for structural test, ground running, flight tests, and eventual production.

The whole system will be much more robust in service than in the first version of the airframe, and includes core design details such as:

• improved brow line to improve upward visibility for pilot
• improved space in the bottom corner of the airframe to accommodate the crew seat
• all new doors, improved mounting of hinges, multi-point locking mechanism
• modified door recesses and bond flanges
• inclusion of hard points on the underside for attachment of utilities equipment
• implementation of hook attachment detail
• new scheme for gearbox mounting to improve vibration absorption
• improved trim tank assembly
• simplified attachment of undercarriage to airframe frame
• new landing light system - wing-tip lights, nose lights, signature lights down the side

Helicopter pilots know you need a robust landing light system for safe VFR flying, day and night, on or off airport.

We’re developing the optimum optics and LED combinations to give the best possible illumination and situational awareness for anybody using the system, while at the same time being sensible about the amount of power we use.

There are two new nose clusters ready for testing operationally in the air that offer about a 2 to 3 times improvement in the range of illumination we can achieve, demonstrated in calibrated tests done on the ground. These should allow the pilot to see ground textures from about 800 to 1,000 feet up, whereas a typical landing light will generally only give you texture down at 300, 400 feet at absolute best.

In terms of wing tip lights, we have also achieved about a 2 to 3 factor improvement in overall illumination performance.

The signature lighting strip provides a striking white light to support the wing-tip lights for improved lateral illumination downwards and upwards to improve situational awareness in the final stages of approach or take-off from a confined or off-airport landing site at night, making it easier and safer.

“Our first-generation lighting system provided comparable performance with existing aircraft landing lights but considering the advances in modern optics and modern LED technology available, we were keen to enhance the performance of the landing lights to allow you to start to determine surface textures and potential obstructions much higher than was previously possible.” - Jason

We’ve been exploring a night vision system as a pass-through layer for the digital cockpit that lets you see what you’re flying over even in really low light levels. This will offer the same number of options you would have during day VFR flying to select a safe site to aim an approach towards - totally game-changing for night VFR flying for private and commercial pilots alike. In addition, this IR system makes the presence of low-lying clouds much easier to see at night.

The tests we conducted revealed a somewhat surprising result - the contrast of white text on black when implemented in an LCD display tends to pick up glare and reflection in the darker areas of the screen that diminish your ability to read some of the white writing. So the colour palette is being tuned to get the intensity of light coming out of the darker areas of the screen back up and this has made it much more readable.

The downside is that this blocks some of the view that would have been available in a traditional helicopter layout. Our solution was to provide a video feed as the background to the instrument console, so we’ve been testing it, and have found that the restoration of the view you get with the pass-through feed camera is excellent.

With this range of technologies, both day and night VFR flying are greatly enhanced in the HX50.

The primary focus of the engine team at the moment is getting as much of the developed hardware on to the test bench as soon as possible to validate and prove that each of the elements of the engine are working as designed and as intended.

With the last components for the starter generator going through the new machine shop, and the test rig for the system about to be installed in PC1, our next task will be to get the starter generator and its control system, the power management unit, on test and working properly.

While that’s going on, we’ll be completing the build and then the testing of the speed reduction gearbox and the entire GT50 drivetrain, qualifying that for running both with the whole engine and then later for flight tests.

A lot of work has been focused on the core of the turbo machinery including the compressor impeller, compressor disc and a lot of the core shaft components that are now ready for production in the new machine shop. 

Extensive, sophisticated simulation work and testing has been done on the integration of the fuel nozzles with the swirler system, resulting in a robust swirler design, as well as the development of a duplex nozzle.

The team has also been focused on getting the last few components of the combustion system working and the whole gas generator on the bench and running, generating 500 hp. That will lead on to getting the whole engine working and running for the first time as a unit on the test bench.  

Meanwhile we’ve been optimising casting process parameters and equipping PC1 with all the equipment necessary for casting high integrity super alloy turbine blades in-house. We’ve created specific flasks and the means to attach our moulds to the casting machines, preheat them in the preheating furnace, and then the apparatus to transfer them into the casting machine for pouring, filling, cooling and solidification.