Last Day at HeliExpo 2013, Las Vegas

Bell 407 with Cobham SAS system

The last day at HeliExpo was as fun packed as the earlier ones.
It started with an announcement that Erickson Air Crane have bought Air Amazonia in Brazil, from the parent company HRT. This is the helicopter division of the oil exploration plant and, as the CEO of HRT explained, he cannot run all the parts of his company brilliantly, so he had to sell some.
HRT have 10 oil wells and will be needing both heavy and medium lift helicopters in the future, for pipelaying, further seismic work, and ulimately for people carrying.
In the afternoon, we went out to North Las Vegas airport and flew the above Bell 407 courtesy of Cobham to test their new SAS system for the New Technology section of Helicopter Life magazine. It is a good system, smaller and cheaper than most, it was designed for the R44, but is now being used for the Bell 407 and a couple of the smaller Eurocopter models.