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DEVELOPMENT DOMINIC PERRY LONDON
Airbus Helicopters focuses on maintaining Racer’s pace Programme partners start building components for high-speed technology demonstrator irst flight may have slipped by around 12 months, but at production sites across Europe, components for the Airbus Helicopters Racer high-speed technology demonstrator are beginning to come together. In early April, the slender nose of the new helicopter was revealed as the three sub-assemblies making up its canopy were joined into a single structure. While the development has been relatively untroubled, it has not been without its challenges, and has also required a weight saving drive by the manufacturer. Clearance for manufacturing was triggered by the conclusion of the critical design review in December 2019. Assuming the coronavirus outbreak does not add significant delay to the programme, final assembly should begin by mid-year at Airbus Helicopters’ facility in Marignane, France. “To be precise it is almost all the aircraft which is ready for production but there are some topics that have some delay, although nothing really critical at
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the moment,” says Brice Makinadjian, Airbus Helicopters’ chief engineer for the Racer. Part of the EU-funded Clean Sky 2 programme, the Racer – or Rapid and Cost-Effective Rotorcraft, to use its convoluted acronym – should now make its maiden sortie in the fourth quarter of 2021, later than the original 2020 target.
“There are 50 entities that we have to manage to build an aircraft that will fly” Brice Makinadjian Chief Racer engineer, Airbus Helicopters
The design builds on research conducted with Airbus Helicopters’ X3 demonstrator in the middle of the last decade, but features V-shaped box wings for additional lift, twin pusher propellers and technology to allow one of the two engines to be idled – and rapidly restarted – during the cruise. Given the project’s technical
and industrial ambitions, it should probably come as little surprise that the timeline has slipped somewhat to the right. The Clean Sky project seeks to foster innovation and grow competencies in companies across the continent, all of which means that the development chain for each programme is more complex than usual. For the Racer, while Airbus Helicopters is the project lead at the vehicle level, it has 17 core partners and 35 other partners in the effort. Crucially, none of these are selected by the airframer but by the Clean Sky joint undertaking following an open call process. Some are more familiar with it than others, such as long-time propulsion partner Safran Helicopter Engines, which is supplying twin Aneto-1X powerplants for the technology demonstrator. There are also consortia of industry and research bodies or academia: Romaero and Romania’s INCAS aerospace institute are building the fuselage, while Magnaghi Aeronautica and Italian
aerospace council CIRA are developing the landing gear. And at the other extreme come businesses never previously involved in aerospace, such as German automotive specialists KLK Motorsport and Modell und Formenbau Blasius Gerg, which have teamed as the FastCan consortium to produce the Racer’s lightweight canopy. The time and effort required to manage a group of this size is largely the reason for the programme’s delay, admits Makinadjian. “There are 50 entities that we have to manage in order to build an aircraft that will fly. This brings a bit of complexity in terms of management and it is probably slowing down a little bit the way we can develop,” he says.
FastCan/Airbus Helicopters
PROJECT COMPLEXITIES
Motorsport specialist consortium has designed rotorcraft’s canopy, with structure completed in April 16 | Flight International | 5-11 May 2020
His comments are echoed by Antonello Marino, project officer for the Fast Rotorcraft Innovative Aircraft Demonstrator Platform within the Clean Sky programme. “The major challenge is that it is a programme that is built in a way that is co-ordinated by the leader but receives contributions from a number of complementary grants and partners,” he says. flightglobal.com
