For the first six months of 2020, it seemed that used helicopter prices were plummeting with soaring insurance rates, the global pandemic, and oil prices that collapsed to a record negative $37.63 per barrel.
“It’s the worst helicopter market in 40 years,” Jason Kmiecik, president of aircraft pricing specialist HeliValue$, said last summer. Overall helicopter flight hours dropped by 30 percent save for firefighting, a sector that enjoyed record demand in 2020.
Fortunately, the truly bad time didn’t last, but it is still firmly a buyer’s market. By third-quarter 2020, indications of a recovery had begun; by year-end the numbers had improved enough that Aero Asset was characterizing the market as “resilient.”
The used helicopter market recovered enough in the second half of last year to outperform dismal 2019 unit sales volumes, Aero Asset concluded. “Markets showed incredible resilience in Q3 and Q4,” the company noted. “Overall, 2020 preowned retail sales volume (number of units) rose by 10 percent year-over-year and 2020 saw the most retail transactions in the last four years.”
Altogether, 143 used helicopters sold last year worth $516 million out of 245 offered for sale valued at about $1 billion. The rebound was led by a sharp increase in both the prices and sales volumes for Sikorsky S-92 and Airbus H225 heavy twins.
Aero Asset forecasts that the used market will continue to improve in 2021.
Airbus Helicopters has grown its HCare Smart and HCare Infinite customer support program enrollments to 2,400 helicopters, representing 20 percent of its installed worldwide fleet. The contracts cover 250 operators in more than 70 countries, according to Christoph Zammert, the company’s v-p of customer support and services. Customers are evenly split between civil and government users, he said.
At present, HCare contracts skew to customers with medium to heavy helicopters, but “it is becoming more frequent on our light twins—the H135 and the H145,” said Zammert. He pointed to recent HCare contracts signed with Air Methods, covering 111 of its H135s and H145s.
HCare was a large contributor to Airbus Helicopters’ overall revenues in pandemic-ravaged 2020, which increased by 4 percent compared with 2019, though new helicopter deliveries fell 10 percent. “HCare played an important role in that,” Zammert said. “We’ve seen overall growth in our services and support revenue while at the same time flying hours during the pandemic have been reduced by about 10 percent compared with 2019."
Zammert said Airbus plans to expand HCare to cover legacy aircraft, such as several models of the Puma series and the EC120B. A program for these aircraft will be launched later this year. HCare also is increasing its training offerings to include more remote training and the increased use of online and virtual reality.
At Hillsboro Aero Academy in Troutdale, Oregon, rotorcraft training continues although the number of students and flight hours dropped during the pandemic. “The travel ban hit us hard,” said Jared Friend, general manager of the company’s Troutdale location.
Although Hillsboro Aero moved into its current building at Troutdale Airport in 2008, it wasn’t until 2019 that this facility switched to helicopter-only training. Hillsboro Aero operates combined fixed-wing and helicopter training facilities in Redmond, Oregon, and North Las Vegas, Nevada, and until the move in 2019, its Hillsboro, Oregon facility also offered training in both. Annual flight hours for the whole company were about 64,500 during 2020. “We took a hit of about 25 percent on flight hours [in 2020],” Friend said.
Traffic at Hillsboro was getting too busy for effective helicopter training, however, so the company decided to move all its Portland-area helicopter training activities to Troutdale, where getting airborne is much faster and the proximity to wide-open spaces is better.
About 90 percent of Hillsboro Aero’s students are ab initio, with the remainder already coming with some experience or transitioning from fixed-wing into helicopters. Until the pandemic, many of the academy’s students—both fixed-wing and helicopter—were from China, but Covid halted their ability to travel to the U.S. Hillsboro Aero also hosts students from Europe, and some of those students have been starting to return.
Honeywell Adds Major Upgrades to Helicopter Avionics
Honeywell avionics engineers have been busy developing new products for helicopters, primarily Leonardo’s AW139. The medium-twin helicopter’s Honeywell Epic avionics suite is now upgradeable to the latest standard—Phase 8—and operators soon will be able to add Honeywell’s RDR-7000 weather radar and the -036 enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS) upgrade.
Available now in new-build AW139s, Phase 8, which includes the Inav 2.0 interface, was certified in September 2020 by EASA and should soon be approved by the FAA. Leonardo will offer a service bulletin to upgrade in-service AW139s. The Phase 8 upgrade adds track-centered capability to the SmartView synthetic vision system (SVS).
The RDR-7000 weather radar brings features introduced with the RDR-4000 fixed-wing radar to rotorcraft with improved reliability and lower power requirements. The new radar weighs 15 pounds, has a 12-inch antenna, and includes hazard alerting features such as turbulence detection to 60 nm. The AW139 STC will be available soon, and Honeywell is working on other platforms for RDR-7000 upgrades.
Honeywell worked with HeliOffshore, the UK CAA, and EASA to develop safety and situational awareness enhancements that are included in the -036 upgrade for the EGPWS MK XXII helicopter terrain awareness and warning system (HTAWS). The upgrade is available for AW139s with Phase 7 and higher avionics and it has already been EASA approved, with FAA approval imminent. It will also be available for any helicopter with Honeywell’s EGPWS MK XXII HTAWS.
Pilot of the Year Robert McCabe Brought Lessons to USCG
HAI’s Pilot of the Year, U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Lt. Cdr. Robert McCabe, originally joined the service to become involved in humanitarian and search-and-rescue work. But when assigned to a ship in Astoria, Oregon, he was inspired to become a pilot after watching Sikorsky MH-60T Jayhawks perform rescues. He attended flight school and returned as an MH-60T pilot.
Since then he has accumulated 2,700 flight hours, performed countless rescue missions, and helped change the course of Coast Guard training through his airmanship, HAI said in announcing his selection for the award.
During a November 2019 rescue mission off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, McCabe's crew became disoriented when a squall set in during the night, reducing visibility to a quarter-mile and raising the seas to 15-foot waves. “The aircraft started to bank 40 degrees, simultaneously pitching more than 14 degrees nose up and rapidly slowing while descending,” HAI said. McCabe recognized that they had become disoriented and coached the flying pilot through an instrument transition, returning to stable flight. “McCabe’s situational awareness, decisiveness, and assertiveness were instrumental in leading the crew to avoid a near-catastrophic situation,” HAI said.
“That experience really brought home that we as a community need to...do everything we can to learn from our mistakes,” McCabe said. The USCG used the lessons learned to update training and focus on spatial disorientation.
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