The long-awaited Bell 525 Relentless will take part in a six-month, 500-hour operational evaluation with Omni Helicopters Guyana once it has gained certification, the two companies have announced.
Bell believes it will finally secure approval for the fly-by-wire super medium from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) this year, with the operational evaluation slated to start soon afterwards.
Under the agreement, one production aircraft — which will be on display at Bell’s booth at Verticon in Dallas, Texas, this week — will travel down to Georgetown, Guyana, along with Bell pilots, to begin the flights.
““We believe that the market needs the aircraft, and we’ve been working with Bell for over a year on the potential to do a full-scale kind of operational evaluation,” said Duncan Moore, group chief operating officer of Omni Helicopters International.
“There’s a lot of interest in the product, and it just, in our view, needed someone to step forward and say, ‘OK, let’s take it at work. Let’s bridge the gap between the certification flying and the real world.’ “
The aircraft will be flying a “highly representative” mission, he said, with Omni crews taking over more flight responsibility as the program matures.
The flights will build from straightforward initial “out and back” shuttles with a single stop, to full operational tempo.
“We’ll have it at representative weight, and we’ll try different mission profiles,” said Moore. “By about month three, we’ll have the aircraft flying almost as part of the flying program. So it’ll be going to work every day, flying three trips, doing multi stops, and towards the end of the process, we’ll throw diversions in. We’ll really wring it out.”
Omni’s engineering team will look at how the aircraft is maintained in a controlled environment “when everything’s going well,” said Moore — and also how straightforward it is to maintain when the aircraft is shutdown offshore in more challenging environments.
“Hopefully [the operational evaluation] will help Omni, it’ll help our customers, and it will help Bell to get the product into the market,” said Moore. “Because clearly, we need something looking ahead into the next five to eight years that can pick up the medium- to long-range mission work.”
Mike Deslatte, SVP of the Bell 525 program, said he couldn’t be specific in terms of a certification date for the type, as “we don’t fully control the timeline.”
However, he said the path forward to certification “is pretty straightforward” at this point. “We’re committed to bringing this aircraft to market and supporting offshore oil-and-gas operations in its initial fielding.”
Deslatte said 2024 was “an incredibly productive year,” in terms of preparing the type for entry into service, with customer service teams well positioned to support the aircraft once it is in the field.
Bell also completed over 60 certification deliverables with the FAA last year, and completed a number of critical Type Inspection Authorization (TIA) flight tests, he said.
“While the team is completing the remaining tests for type cert and preparing to enter function and reliability [F&R] testing with the FAA, we have an aircraft configured and ready for those tests, and we’re completing all the necessary prerequisites before entering into F&R with the FAA,” said Deslatte.
Meanwhile, two of the three 525 prototypes are now performing cold weather testing and icing testing, in Alaska and Michigan, respectively.
“These tests will support cold weather expansion of the five to five and full icing capability, both of which are anticipated to be introduced after the initial type cert of the aircraft,” said Deslatte.
Engagement with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) was “reinvigorated” in October, said Deslatte, with that regulator’s approval required to begin deliveries to the one customer announced so far: Norwegian energy company Equinor. When that order was announced last year, deliveries were scheduled to begin in 2026.
“At this time, have a very mature platform to work with [EASA] on, in terms of validating the aircraft,” said Deslatte. “I do believe we’ll have a good idea later this year on what additional work we need to complete to achieve EASA certification.”
Danny Maldonaldo, chief commercial officer at Bell, said: “We believe in this product, we have customers that believe in it as well, and we’re excited to show what it can do in the marketplace.”
