X-3 gjør furore i USA

Story of the Week

Skeptics to Smiles: Eurocopter X3 Woos DC Military Operators

Eurocopter’s X3 U.S. summer tour—which started with a June 20 ceremony in Grand Prairie, Texas and included trips to Redstone Arsenal, Fort Bragg, Davison Army Airfield and Manassas Regional Airport—will end on Thursday after a visit to the Pentagon. From there, it will make a ferry flight to Richmond, Va. before being disassembled and flown back to Europe.

Rotor & Wing caught up with Eurocopter’s X3 test pilots and mechanics, as well as Stephen Mundt, EADS North America vice president of business development, on Tuesday evening at Manassas Airport as the aircraft returned from Davison. They noted that the X3 just went over 100 hours flown earlier in the day, with about half of that time logged since arriving in the U.S. More than 40 pilots have flown the aircraft as part of the U.S. journey, with Rotor & Wing Editor-at-Large Ernie Stephens among the first to fly the X3 (on June 18) outside of the company’s test pilots (see Ernie’s Pilot Report in the August issue).

Mundt, who flew the prototype himself twice, described the reaction to the prototype from both military and commercial operators, noting that many of the pilots came out of the cockpit with smiles on their faces. “You watch people walk out to this aircraft, and they’re not sold. They’re going, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, listen, I don’t know if this is going to work for me.’ They get in, and when they get out, they say, ‘Wow, I could think of so many ways to use this aircraft!’”

Experimental test pilot Herve Jammayrac, who’s been involved with the X3 from its start as a “clean sheet of paper” less than five years ago, says that “we’ve done a lot of the work” related to engineering and design required to turn the X3 prototype into an offshoot commercial or military production variant. But he cautioned that there are a lot of additional issues such as certification, maintenance support, training and tooling that need to be set up related to a production aircraft, adding that the X3 is still in the demonstration phase.