PARIS AIR SHOW REPORT
By Giovanni de Briganti
This year’s show
gave rotorcraft a rare
opportunity to shine
in its own right.
squad, in addition to two pilots, flight engineer and two gunners. AW says that, at a
pinch, it can seat 18 soldiers in its 11-cubic-
meter cabin (and 3-cubic-meter stowage
compartment), but they would have to be
very small soldiers indeed, to judge by the
size of the seats fitted to the mock-up.
The Turkish government was expected to announce the winner of the TUHP
competition, which calls for a total of 109
helicopters (plus 110 more to follow later)
for seven different government departments, in early July, but as this hasn’t happened, the decision will slide back until
the autumn.
All photos by Ernie Stephens
This will allow AW to pursue the 149’s
development. The company plans to fly
an engineering testbed by year-end, with
the first prototype to follow in mid-2010.
It then plans three years for qualification
— no civil certification is planned — leading to initial deliveries in the second half of
2013. The engineering testbed, by the way,
will consist of an AW149 fuselage mated to
AW139 drive-train.
The company has not yet begun to
market the AW149, as it prefers to wait
for first flight, but it is confident that the
design will find as sizeable a market as its
One welcome by-product of the global recession is that this year’s Paris Air Show was largely free of the boring succession of multi-billion dollar deals for Airbus and Boeing
airliners that have dominated past editions.
And, as orders and hard news in the military fixed-wing field were also few and far
between, rotary-wing aviation had a rare
opportunity to shine on its own.
And, as luck would have it, helicopter
manufacturers had a number of new,
or nearly new, products to exhibit, and
announcements to make.
The two European majors, playing on
their home turf, both managed to exhibit
significant products for the first time
in Paris. A year after first unveiling the
concept at the Farnborough Air Show,
AgustaWestland brought to Paris a full-scale mock-up of its latest military helicopter, the AW-149, in a variant designed
to compete for the Turkish government’s
Utility Helicopter Program (TUHP). The
other competitor is a variant of Sikorsky’s
Black Hawk; which Turkey has been operating for 20 years or so.
Although Paris was not its true “
premiere,” as it had been unveiled at the IDEF
defense exhibition in Istanbul in late April,
the TUHP 149 generated significant interest on its first appearance at a major show.
The TUHP149 was displayed in fully-armed configuration, carrying a full range
of weapons including rocket pods, guided
missiles and cabin-mounted automatic
weapons. A point of interest is that, unlike
its predecessor, the highly successful commercial AW139, the AW149 is fitted with a
complete avionics suite developed and produced by AW. In addition to moving profit
margins back to AW, the use of proprietary
avionics also ensures that the company is
not held hostage to the perhaps conflicting priorities of a vendor when it urgently
needs modifications or major changes.
The TUHP 149 is designed to carry a
standard Turkish Army nine-man infantry
