Fri, Dec 18, 2009
New Aircraft Developed In Cooperation With China
The EC175, the latest member of the Eurocopter range, today
performed its official maiden flight in the skies above Marignane,
France. At the controls were Alain Di Bianca, Eurocopter
Experimental Test Pilot, as well as Michel Oswald and Patrick
Bremont, Flight Test Engineers. Officials, industrial partners,
launch customers and Eurocopter employees were all on hand for the
event.
Photo Courtesy Eurocopter
This newest addition to the Eurocopter family in the
7-metric-ton class has been developed and manufactured in
cooperation with the China Aeronautics Industries Group Corp.
(AVIC), a longstanding Eurocopter partner.
Photo Courtesy Eurocopter
"It's an immense pleasure to see the EC175 soaring through the
skies," declared Eurocopter CEO Lutz Bertling. "This helicopter was
developed in close cooperation with our customers to ensure it
would be perfectly suited to their needs—particularly in
terms of safety and comfort. This is the product everyone's been
waiting for on the civil market. I would like to congratulate and
thank our colleagues from China, all our personnel who invested so
much time and effort in this project, and, of course, our
industrial partners. Their combined efforts have made it possible
for the EC175 to perform its maiden flight right on schedule,
that’s to say exactly four years after the program was
launched, which is a real technological wizardry."
Photo Courtesy Eurocopter
The new generation EC175 has a multirole design and can carry
out a wide scope of civil missions. It falls between the AS365
Dauphin (4/5 metric tons) and the AS332/EC225 Super Puma (9/11
metric tons) families. Depending on its configuration, it can hold
up to 16 passengers. A total of 114 EC175s have already been
ordered by 14 different customers. Certification of the EC175 by
the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is slated for 2011, and
the first deliveries are scheduled to follow in 2012. Eurocopter
expects to sell 800 EC175s over the next twenty years, creating
nearly 2000 new direct and indirect jobs.
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