2
Photo Info
Skyryse believes its highly automated touchscreen flight control system, which it has been testing on the Robinson R44, will improve the safety of VFR operations, in addition to making IFR flight more accessible. Skyryse Photo

Skyryse reveals plans for IFR-capable R66 helicopter

By Elan Head | March 6, 2023

Estimated reading time 9 minutes, 41 seconds.

Southern California technology startup Skyryse has announced plans to certify a version of the Robinson R66 helicopter for instrument flight rules, promising to radically reduce the cost of helicopter IFR flight while enabling new levels of safety and reliability.

Skyryse will certify its FlightOS technology first on the Robinson R66, and plans to unveil its first fully conforming airframe later this year. Skyryse Image
Skyryse will certify its FlightOS technology first on the Robinson R66, and plans to unveil its first fully conforming airframe later this year. Skyryse Image

According to Skyryse CEO Mark Groden, the company hopes to certify an IFR-capable R66 equipped with its proprietary FlightOS system in the next 18 months. If successful, the product could potentially jump start widespread helicopter IFR operations in the U.S., which have been held back in part by a lack of affordable IFR rotorcraft.

“When you look at the capabilities and you look at the cost, we’re somewhere around a quarter of the acquisition cost . . . and probably less than half of the operating costs as compared to the next capable IFR single-engine helicopter,” Groden told Vertical. “And that’s completely game-changing.”

Light single-engine airplanes routinely fly under IFR in the U.S., but commercial single-engine IFR helicopters were essentially driven to extinction in the early 2000s after policy changes by the Federal Aviation Administration made their certification cost-prohibitive.

In 2001, the FAA began requiring all helicopter manufacturers to substantiate loss of attitude, airspeed or barometric altitude indications under IFR as “extremely improbable” on the order of 10-9, meaning unlikely to occur more often than once in a billion flight hours. Achieving that level of reliability requires the kind of redundant systems that are typically only found on multi-engine, transport category aircraft, which the utility-oriented light helicopter industry mostly couldn’t afford.

In 2015, a coalition of helicopter manufacturers, operators and associations put out a white paper arguing that the FAA’s overly stringent certification standards had actually decreased safety by driving the helicopter industry away from the controlled, predictable environment of IFR flight. Instead, helicopter pilots whose only exposure was to visual flight rules operations had normalized “scud running” — flying low and close to clouds in ways that put them at risk for collisions with obstacles or loss of control.

According to the white paper, over the period from 2001 to 2013, a total of 326 people worldwide died in crashes of single-engine helicopters that were flying low to avoid weather, accidents that likely would not have occurred under IFR.

In 2017, the FAA introduced a safety continuum to make it easier to certify safety-enhancing technologies including IFR equipment on normal category rotorcraft (the European Union Aviation Safety Agency adopted a similar safety continuum last month). However, manufacturers weren’t strongly motivated to pursue IFR capability for single-engine helicopters until the U.S. Navy required it for the TH-73 training helicopter competition. That resulted in two IFR-certified products: Leonardo’s TH-119 (which won the competition) and an IFR version of the Bell 407GXi.

Skyryse is uniquely positioned to achieve IFR certification for the R66 because it is developing a drop-in fly-by-wire system that replaces conventional flight controls with a touchscreen tablet and joystick for simple, highly stabilized flight.

Skyryse is already targeting 10-9 reliability for its FlightOS, which means that the backup power source and other redundant systems needed for IFR flight are baked into its product. Meanwhile, removing equipment associated with mechanical flight controls, such as push-pull tubes, creates extra space for those redundant systems, which would be difficult to fit on a conventional light helicopter.

Skyryse believes its highly automated touchscreen flight control system, which it has been testing on the Robinson R44, will improve the safety of VFR operations, in addition to making IFR flight more accessible. Skyryse Photo
Skyryse believes its highly automated touchscreen flight control system, which it has been testing on the Robinson R44, will improve the safety of VFR operations, in addition to making IFR flight more accessible. Skyryse Photo

“The Robinson platform is actually one of the most challenging platforms from a volume, weight and power requirements standpoint. And we understood that if we could crack the nut there, then obviously everything would be downhill,” said Groden, who is designing FlightOS to be compatible with almost any type of aircraft.

“We’re going to be showing in the future everything that comes out of the R66. And even to our partners this has kind of blown them away; they’ve been shocked how much comes out of the airframe as no longer being necessary,” he said. “It’s going to be even more impressive when we get into some of the bigger airframes and all of a sudden, more space is available as a result of our system.”

Last year, Skyryse and Air Methods announced a partnership to eventually retrofit more than 400 single-engine helicopters and airplanes in the air medical operator’s fleet with FlightOS. While Skyryse is not yet sharing a price estimate for FlightOS on the R66 or other aircraft models, Groden said that Air Methods’ commitment illustrates the product’s compelling value proposition.

“For Air Methods, they’ve already invested in the aircraft. . . . In many cases, they’ve already invested in the autopilot system and advanced avionics, and they’ve chosen to rip all of that out and replace it with FlightOS. So that’s the highest cost anyone could possibly bear as compared to the assembly line fitting of the system where those [autopilot and avionics] systems would never have been installed,” he said.

Of course, all of that is contingent upon FlightOS obtaining FAA certification. Skyryse is making progress on this front, having recently announced that the FAA has accepted 100 percent of the company’s means of compliance, which spell out how Skyryse will show that it meets the safety rules applicable to its product. The startup, which has raised more than $260 million to date, must now proceed to demonstrate that compliance through extensive ground and flight testing.

It remains to be seen how the FAA will approach pilot certification for FlightOS, which is a pioneering example of the simplified vehicle operations (SVO) concept. Proponents of SVO expect it will reduce the burden of flight training by eliminating the manual skillsets that are costly and time-consuming to learn and maintain, although pilots will still need to demonstrate their knowledge and ability to operate safely in the national airspace system.

“When we’re thinking about the future, our expectation is that people will go through a very similar process as they do today to get certified into aircraft like the helicopter equipped with FlightOS and then also into IFR . . . and we have really good participation with [the FAA] to figure out what this future looks like,” Groden said. “I do think it’s not going to make a lot of sense if you’ve learned how to fly with our system to go backwards and try and fly the stick and rudder conventional, and I think that’s completely OK.”

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Seminole Sheriff Helicopters

Notice a spelling mistake or typo?

Click on the button below to send an email to our team and we will get to it as soon as possible.

Report an error or typo

Have a story idea you would like to suggest?

Click on the button below to send an email to our team and we will get to it as soon as possible.

Suggest a story