- ARLINGTON, Texas (Reuters)
- A hybrid aircraft that is part helicopter, part airplane and has the
potential to change civil aviation took its first flight on Friday.
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- Texas-based Bell/Agusta Aerospace Co. said its BA 609
tilt-rotor aircraft flew at an altitude of about 50 feet in its first test
flight. The aircraft has engines that pivot 90 degrees so it can take off
vertically like a helicopter then fly horizontally like a plane.
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- "The first flight was flawless, the 609 performed
exactly as we knew it would," said Roy Hopkins the Bell/Agusta test
pilot at the controls of the aircraft.
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- The company is banking on obtaining civilian transport
category flight certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
A military tilt-rotor aircraft -- the V-22 "Osprey" -- was grounded
in December 2000, in the wake of two crashes that killed 23 Marines.
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- The BA 609 has two Pratt & Whitney turboprop engines
and can hold six to nine passengers, depending on its configuration. The
main selling point of the aircraft is that it does not need a runway on
either end of the flight.
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- It flies about twice the speed of a typical helicopter
with comparable capacity and has a range of 750 nautical miles, much longer
than a helicopter. It takes about 20 seconds for it to transition between
its airplane and helicopter modes.
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- To put it anther way, it can pick up an executive from
her New York office and land that executive on the helipad of the company's
Washington office some 220 miles away in less than an hour.
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- The aircraft was jointly developed by Bell Helicopter,
a Textron Inc. company and by Italy's Agusta, an AgustaWestland company.
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- Bell/Agusta is looking for the BA 609 to be fully FAA
certified by 2007, when it will start marketing the aircraft. It has about
70 orders -- a two- to three-year backlog -- for the BA 609.
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- Some of the potential uses for the civilian tilt-rotor
include serving as corporate aircraft, a rescue aircraft, and as a means
of ferrying oil workers to offshore rigs, it said.
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- One problem for all vertical-lift aircraft, including
tilt-rotors occurs during a rapid descent at low air-speed when the rotors
can lose lift, causing the aircraft to crash or flip over. This dangerous
flight condition is known as vortex ring state, or VRS.
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- One of the crashes that occurred with the Osprey -- built
by Boeing and Textron -- was likely due to VRS. Aviation safety experts
have said VRS will not be a major concern for civilian tilt-rotors because
they will not be used like the Osprey in dropping troops into war zones.
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- The civilian version, built to different specifications
from the Osprey, will also not be weighed down by a heavy undercarriage
designed to absorb enemy fire as on the military's version, they said.
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- Pratt & Whitney is a unit of United Technologies
Corp.
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