Flying through

Sunday 12 February 2012

Details of Bell 525 Relentless

This is the front of the Bell 525 Relentless. Swivel seats is one novelty, which allows for easy ingress and egress for the pilot. Being able to get in and out, both for pilots and passengers, was one of the advising customer panel's major concerns. Other things they wanted were - any engines as long as they were GE. They settled for GE CT7 02F1 engines.
The 525 also has fly by wire controls using BAE flight control computers. 5 blade main rotor, which was felt to be necessary for such a large and weighty helicopter and a four blade cantored tail rotor. A greater than 400 nm range and excellent visibility.
Gross weight is 18,000 lbs and there are currently 16 seats, although it can have other modes. There are large sliding doors or as Bell CEO John Garrison put it, "you are only a seat away from egress."
The engines are 1280 hp and there is a massive luggage bay.
Although the first flight will not be until 2014 there are some basic ideals of flight specs: Speed more than 140 knots, range more than 400 nm, useful load 4,000 lbs.
They will be using a Garmin G5000H avionics package and the machine will have low cabin noise and vibration.
It was described as such a modern cockpit it was hardly recognizable with a side-stick cyclic and a side-stick collective.

No comments:

Post a Comment