First Walkthrough Of The Hill HX50!!!

welcome back you guys I'm so excited to show you around we're at Hai right now it's been an incredible event for the last couple days I'm actually losing my voice so hopefully I can keep it for this video but I wanted to give you guys a little tutorial just a little walk around of the Hill hx50 cuz I know so many of you guys have been asking about it I'm going show you some uh details and features kind of from a pilot's perspective so not so much an engineer point of view but a pilot's perspective let's just dive right into it I'm going to start in the front and just kind of do a walk around as if you were doing doing a pre-flight almost and just show you some of the features that I really like um all of the lighting in the helicopter is incredible because it's going to be so bright so when you're flying at night you know you want to have that illumination of especially Landing light of where you coming in from if you're doing an auto rotation coming in for that Landing be able to light up the ground at an appropriate amount of time and stuff so that's a really really nice thing that I I really enjoy the lighting is really a detail feature of the helicopter as we come around to the side here we've got this uh kind of unique strip lighting that goes all the way along the side on both sides um obviously it's it's like the position light so it's the red on the left the green on the right and that really I think improves not only the safety of the aircraft but it's just a really neat feature a neat design um a lot of people have been talking about glare and so forth so we've designed it in such a way that when you're inside the helicopter you're not actually going to be getting that glare um inside the the cabin so people have been asking about that so that's kind of a neat thing looking at the underc carriage so we have two different options for the underc carriage we have the fixed gids which you see here and then we have the Wheeled retractable landing gear we'll do another review on the differences uh about that in a little bit but um this one we've got the fixed SK undercarriage underneath we're going to be having um hardpoint mounting uh positions so Universal mounts underneath the aircraft obviously for the cargo hook that's going to be something that's going to be available from the time that the aircraft comes out um but then to be able to um fasten different things to the helicopter cameras pods spray gear all that type of thing so that's going to be on universal mounts underneath the aircraft which I think is pretty cool as well coming around we'll get to the door do is uh when we get to the other side but uh just love the way everything is kind of built into the aircraft one of the big things that Jason really wanted to focus on was making sure that the aerodynamics of the helicopter um was incredible throughout the whole thing so from top to bottom um believe it or not you get about 30% of your drag from the undercarriage and about 30% from the rotorhead so we'll talk about the rotorhead in a minute so the skitted uh helicopter is going to go probably about 15 knots slower than the wheel version the wheel version will be cruising at about 140 knots so the skitted version fortunately be about 15 not slower than that but you know every feature of the helicopter uh from the door latches and and so forth just really designed with that aerodynamics sort of in mind um Coming backwards here so again we've got the position lights on the side lots of light uh very bright and then obviously the detail features with the red and the green on the other side as well so neat to see that so um features uh that uh a lot of people have been asking about how do you get up on the rotor head so inside of here this is the the back bulk head for uh the back seat seats and then the baggage Bay in the middle here is where we have our crash resistant fuel bladder tank so it's a huge fuel tank it's 175 gallon fuel tank so it's absolutely massive so theoretically if you wanted to you could put 5 hours of fuel in this helicopter um which would be you know let's say three people in the aircraft you could go for 700 nautical miles so really incredible range if you have a full load of people in there let's say five people at 200 pounds a piece and some luggage then that gives you about three hours worth of fuel left over so really neat to have that this here they're still deciding exactly how they're going to do the steps up it'll either be in the baggage Bay or it'll be right here but this panel is going to open up and so this is where you're going to be doing the fuel filling so this will be the the fuel nozzle right here and then most likely the steps will be right here as well to be able to grab on climb up the steps and then get up onto the deck now a lot of people have been really asking about how do you inspect the helicopter because everything is so fared up obviously for the aerodynamic purposes but how do you get up there and actually look at things is this the way it's actually going to be in production are you going to be able to do pre-flight of course you are so um the donut Hub up top so the round part that you guys see up at the top there that's going to open up and so you're going to be able to visually inspect everything inside of there this top panel right here this is where the mainroad gearbox is and the mainroad drive shaft so this is going to actually fold away so kind of like a clam shell it'll fold forward and away from the aircraft and then this one right here this is actually going to peel back and away so it's just going to be quick release latches um back and away from the aircraft and then there's actually this one right here as well and this will fold open and So within a couple of uh minutes you can get all the latches undone everything opened up climb up there onto the deck and you'll be able to actually walk around on the deck visually inspect all the way from the very top of the rotorhead pitch links and everything all the way down your drivetrain and pretty much to the very back of the uh the Tail Road drive shaft so really awesome inspection capability for that and then also a lot of people ask about the blade fold system so um the same idea you're going to get up there you're going to be able to do the blade fold in in that uh similar manner if we look at the the rotor blade right here we've got two pins on there it's going to look pretty much like this in production if you're going to get the blade fold kit so it'll be a d a double locking mechanism uh pin you just unlatch it they loosen off the pins one of them stays in one of them comes out and then the blade just folds back there's going to be a guard that comes out on the tail boom and so those blades are actually going to fold into that guard on the tail boom so that process will probably take you about 5 minutes or so to do it's going to be a pretty quick and and simple process to do um so it's pretty pretty neat to have that feature available so let's look into the baggage Bay this is one of the cool features um with how big this baggage Bay is really well designed and so um if you have a look inside here tons of room I could sleep in here if I wanted to so you can put tons of luggage um basically three full-size suitcases with another couple of carryon suitcases so really a lot of room golf bags skis yes skis snowboards whatever you guys want surfboards if it's a relatively small surfboard about the same size of skis um you'd be able to fit that in here so really whatever kind of use case you guys want to use it for there is lots of room for that so really a neat feature to be able to have that and again right inside here is where you're having your fuel bladder and so this is where your uh your fuel tank is going to be sitting so um it's in the strongest part of the aircraft so structurally um the entire helicopter is made out of carbon fiber so very robust very strong creates a a strong kind of roll cage around you which is really important from the pilot and passenger point of view uh but this area right here is kind of the strongest structural part of the helicopter as far as the carbon fiber structure goes so putting the fuel bladder inside of that is kind of the safest and best place we can put it speaking of fuel by the way in the nose underneath the helicopter so external from the cabin there's going to be a small uh trimmer tank so it'll be a fuel bladder tank as well and then you're going to be able it'll it'll automatically transfer fuel from that trimmer tank back to this tank in whichever way it needs to go and that's the way we deal with a huge center of gravity changes so if you're just in there by yourself a light pilot just flying with Solo or you have a full load of people and some luggage and so forth um the the helicopter is going to be able to recognize that and it'll actually trim out that fuel for you um so that uh you're never going to have any issues on center of gravity obviously we need to still do our calculations for that and that's actually going to be done on the hill digital cockpit so on the screens that I'll show you inside that'll be something that you can uh do that weight and balance right there um coming back again aerodynamics we've got this uh nice large horizontal stabilizer back here providing stability all all the aerodynamics that we need little features like this I love you know people look at this and go wo this is kind of interesting why why do we have this feature us you know kind of away from the airframe again this is to not disrupt the flow along the the aircraft along the the tailboom because the moment you lose the flow of the air um that's when you create a lot of drag and so we're doing everything we can to uh reduce the amount of drag on the helicopter so so that we can get that 140 knot Cruise speed that everybody is uh is really wanting to have some cool features around the tail here so this is linearized ducted fan a lot of people ask questions about the tail is it going to have enough Authority how's it going to feel for pedal input and stuff things that they've done um with this ducted fan they've linearized the input so it means um you know a conventional fenestron is is a non-linear input so it means you need about um 70% of your pedal input before you really get a lot of authority out of it whereas they've linearized this meaning the same as you'd fly in any other conventional tail rotor um the same pedal input that you put you're going to get that much Authority the moment you put in 30 or 50% pedal input you're going to get that Authority immediately out of it so um the performance uh stats that they have calculated at this stage you can take the helicopter at full gross weight hovering out of ground effect at 10,000 ft and you'll still be able to have a wind blowing from any direction at 35 knots so really incredible tail rad Authority this is going to be an amazing tail lots of authority in there so people if anybody's worried about that that's going to not be an issue for you this is a superficial piece right here so this is kind of the way that they're uh they're doing the Stinger um possibly they they'll still need to add a Stinger at the bottom if uh if they find that in testing but really this is designed as a superficial piece so if you were to bang your tail on an auto rotation or a hard Landing or something like that with that tail down um this is designed to be crushable and then you'd be able to replace that um pretty quick and easily so that's uh nice again we wrap around to that signature lighting at the back with the tail light um tail rotor gearbox um obviously on the other side there but really a nice cord on these tail rotor blades again giving it that Authority that it needs so coming down this side of the helicopter um inside here is where the uh the hill gt50 turbine engine is this is the hill gt50 turbine engine yes it is a proprietary engine two Hill helicopters they're going through the testing of it now really exciting times uh for that process but um a very simplified engine really a best uh Hits album so they're taking the best of technologies that have been proven out in the industry and putting it into this um single stage uh turbine we've got a uh starter generator mounted directly to the engine so we get rid of the complex gear boxes in between there um so this is the the PowerHouse the heart of the of the helicopter uh it puts out 500 shaft horsepower so that's uh 400 continuously 440 horsepower for 5 minutes and then 500 horsepower for 30 seconds so really that's what gives it between the lightweight of the aircraft the improved aerodynamics of the blade which we'll talk about a little bit and then the high performance of the the 500 horsepower is what gives this helicopter the performance that it really has cool feature as well we've got the baggage Bay on both sides and I think that's a sort of an important safety feature because if people are passengers are loading um things into the baggage Bay just kind of discourages you walking around the back of the helicopter uh so it's nice to be able to have that option from both sides um looking up at the rotor head we're going toh go check the the rotor system in just a minute here but um it's a three-bladed fully articulated rotor system with a strap pack in there um everything is built into the cuff and I'll I'll show you that because we have a rotor system over on the stand there so a really a neat design but again it um it has that aerodynamic uh design to it because of the fact that again about 30% of your drag comes from that rotor Hub so all the exposed uh things that are normally up there pitch links and uh drag uh uh Drive links and all the rest of things that are up there that is uh pretty using about 30% of your drag by being able to cow that all in you improve that uh drag dramatically and that obviously affects the speed as well so pretty neat there um coming around to this side so we'll hop in the back here for just a second and uh again doors nice and heavy duty sturdy doors uh you hop inside the helicopter tons of room you just climb on in there it's one of the things that you notice about the helicopter is it's substantial it's a it's a big aircraft um you saw me just you know hopping up into there there will be door uh like handles here so you're going to be able to hang on as you're hopping in and out of the helicopter which I think is definitely going to be a good thing for shorter people like me um but being inside the aircraft you know you can put uh three you know good siiz males in here and everybody has enough room and and they're comfortable the visibility is incredible the middle seat I think is probably the best seat in the helicopter um just because they had the best View kind of all around and so I think people are going to really enjoy that and then as far as leg room goes I mean Che this out especially from the back seat you know you can stick your legs uh almost straight out here and you've got tons of room which is awesome and same thing from this as well so neat uh neat to be able to have that having the glass up top just gives you that really nice Airy feel lots of visibility as you're doing turns and so forth you're going to be able to see out there and uh so really nice to have that as well um all the vents built in all around so the helicopter comes standard with climate control so not just air conditioning we've got climate control so hot or cold air um is going to be blowing whatever you choose and that's going to be all through the climate control system on the display up front there so neat to be able to have that built into the aircraft so just hopping back out all right so let's P hop into the pilot seat this is the most fun part here okay so climbing into the helicopter what they've done is they've uh made the cyclic so that you can move it slightly up and down like this it's not very much it's kind of hybrid between um what we're used to in a Robinson style cyclic and then just a conventional cyclic so we still have all the same motion and range and everything that you have but uh each cyclic has the ability to move up and down a little bit this helicopter right now just cuz it's a trade show demonstrator it doesn't have the Dual controls in but normally you'd have the Dual controls in there of course that comes standard on the helicopter it's actually amazing how many people ask does the helicopter have dual controls yeah every helicopter has dual controls because you have to be able to do Flight Training and so forth in it and have the ability to have two Pilots if you want to so definitely has that but a very conventional type cyclic um there's no fly by wire here it's all um it's all flexible Push Pull Tu uh tube uh cables and um so conventional very very uh conventional type controls the one thing that is slightly different is our Collective and so this is built into the center console the reason why they did this is for ergonomics and so now we've got the ability to have in Cruise flight Collective is going to be somewhere around here so we have the ability to kind of be able to rest your elbow on to the center console here um yes we do have a center console you can store things in there so really neat to be able to have some space just to be able to chuck uh different things that you want to as well as your phone I have a charging point right here and uh so that's a place that you can put your phone and uh it'll be charging for you as well so that's kind of a neat thing to have um so the collective as far as all the features go um fairly uh conventional for what we're used to we got a flight idle switch here um to fly put the helicopter into flight or idle mode um it it is a dual fadex system so the startup procedure is going to be very very simple we essentially turn our Master on generator on avionics on and then we open this up and we hit the start button that's basically it and then the computer takes over the Dual fedc system takes over and it'll monitor all your parameters and everything and it'll be obviously in the idle mode at this point and then uh when it gets up to speed and everything's ready to go you hit flight and now you're ready to go flying it's really that simple so this is really the way that you know a helicopter of this category should be nowadays and uh so it's nice to be able to see that as well as far as talking about ergonomics go so the the seat is movable so you can move the seat forward and backwards so depending on you know if you're um down at 4'11 or up at 6'4 or whatever we've designed it for a full range of uh ergonomic uh size of people so that you're comfortable no matter where you are in any position with the pedals and the collective and cyclic and so forth so nice to be able to have that we've got um two touch screen glass display so this is the hill digital cockpit so this is proprietary to Hill all of the systems of the helicopter so about 95% of this helicopter is vertically integrated built in-house by Hill helicopters you know simple things like this glass uh touchcreen display of course these are just off-the-shelf things uh but pretty much you know every other part of the helicopter is proprietary and built by Hill so that's uh the Dual fadex system the autopilot this helicopter comes with a two AIS autopilot standard built into it and you can upgrade to a 4 AIS autopilot if you want to um so neat to be able to have that so we've got the the Dual redundancy system here um everything that the pilot sees you can duplicate it over on the passenger side um as you can see in this uh situation right now so if you have a two-pilot situation or you're doing Flight Training or anything like that or if one of the systems fail because they are redundant from each other um this one fails you can rely on those instruments over there as well so it's nice to be able to have that and then we can just hit this button here this is more of the the PFD mode and so um or the um the infotainment mode so we can have different things like your music playing um your phone is connected to there all the things that you would like to have um you can have that we have different cameras built into the aircraft on the tail inside the cabin and underneath the helicopter and so you can uh flip to those different camera modes as well one of the cool things is you know when you're coming in for landing um you're going to be able to have a downward facing camera that turns on kind of goes into the background of the display and so you'll be able to see kind of almost through this Dash right down to the ground to see you know if there's anything underneath you as you're coming in for that Landing so that's that's really nice as well one thing that a lot of people have been concerned about is they feel like this Dash is really large and it's kind of overwhelming you as far as space goes and you're not going to be able to see that much it's amazing when you're in here um not only the angle of uh of downward uh visibility that you have but these are actually much smaller than people think so in the photos they actually look quite large but when you're actually sitting here uh my downward angle I can see right down on my nose right here I have a chin bubble down here as well so I have really good visibility all the way down to the ground obviously out the side as well we're going to be making the helicopter um pic from the left or the right so right now it's you know set up obviously comfortably with the the the rightand pic cuz the collective is built into this but if you're doing uh Longline operations utility type work um you're going to be able to have the pic on the left and so you're going to be able to be long lining having your head hanging out the the door there another way we can interact with the helicopter is with the the puck in the center here so we're able to adjust any of the features that we just talked about with the center Puck and then you can just push it down and it'll accept that so that's pretty cool you have the the wheel retractable landing gear this is how you're going to bring your gear down just really basic things like your elt the fuel trimmer tank if you need to be adjusting that this is our IPI right here um so this is how we control things like radio frequency transponder barometric pressure all those types of things so they're right here um we have different options to be able to do that if you wanted to flip let's say um you had Comm one or Comm 2 you wanted to flip a frequency you can just push that right there and it'll swap the frequency for you but also right here you can tap onto there and then you can punch in your frequency that you'd like to go to uh hit confirm and it'll go to that frequency for you you can swap frequencies like that um you can just tap here if we go over here it's going to give you all your local airports and I can just tap on one of these local airports and then it's going to drop down if they have different uh comms uh ground Aus Tower whatever happens to be it's going to show you that right there and then just go ahead and select that and confirm so um pretty neat to be able to have all of that sort of built into there um as well as you know all uh um intercoms crew isolation all of those types of things here uh barometric pressure um so you can just go ahead and punch that in and confirm it and then away you go um and that same thing goes for your transponder as well and so we can just put a simple 12200 in there and confirm that and again that's there as well so also all of our autopilot features are built into here as well and so if you're going to have your autopilot on you can go ahead and select those different modes so we've got autopilot and then if it's a two AIS autopilot um you can do your altitude and your heading and then it'll do either the altitude or the air speed it won't do both um and then you can tap your nav on if you tap your nav on it pops up on here you've got a flate plan on your iPad so this is a standard iPad you can pop it out of here has his own power source own GPS and everything and so really neat to be able to have that you can run whatever apps you want for flight Runway Runway HD whatever you like to use um they're all on here and they all slave to the aircraft so right now there's a flight plan already in here it's asking you to accept it so I'm just going to tap on accept here and then that's going to take me onto my flight plan and then if I make any active changes let's say I want to change my route there and I say yeah okay I want to go to there instead then it's going to actually pop up on here and I have to accept that that change so really neat to be able to have that and it's showing here that it's synced so right now it's slaving over to the main display and it's synced onto there so I can have my different features for those different things so really neat to be able to have that system interacting together um and that's really honestly the best way to do things like your your navigation and so forth um just talking a little bit about the the main display here so uh I think the most important thing to to talk about with this is that they've tried to simplify everything when you have a digital cockpit and you can do anything you want with it you can put multiple instruments into the same um instrument and you can make it simpler and easier you can pop information out in in a much better way so this is our first limit indicator over here and it shows our power wherever it happens to be a nice big digital readout for that because it's easy for the eye to be able to catch and see hey you know you can see you're at 34% or whatever happens to be um but then we also have the needle to show that rate change rate change is a really important thing obviously when you're flying helicopters so being able to have that needle to show that rate change is really important over on this side we've got the altitude so it's showing again a digital readout of that and then the needle moves around and shows that altitude and it kind of sweep sweeps up behind it it's a neat little feature sweeps up the altitude behind it so every time you go around it's going to be able to show you basically another th000 ft as it goes through that system so really cool I'm not going to take you through all the different things air speed and so forth but um really it's been designed in such a way that is making the whole process as simple and easy to fly as possible so um this is just a quick overview you guys I hope you enjoyed it um I hope you got some uh good information out of it I'd love to hear you guys' feedback your comments if you have any questions um just leave them in the comments below and I'm going to try and answer anything I can but this has just been a very quick uh simple overview of the hill hx50 and I can't wait to start flly this thing and show it off to you guys it's going to be a really really exciting time we're anticipating first flights by the end of this year so the end of uh 2024 so if things continue uh to progress as planned um it'll be exciting to see this thing take off and and be in the air for the first time this year so looking forward to that hope you guys enjoyed it give this uh video a thumbs up and we'll talk to you guys later than

Channel: Pilot Yellow

Views: 279,341

Keywords: mischa gelb, pilot yellow, yellow pilot, Hill helicopters, 5 seat turbine helicopter, Helicopter, HAI Heli Expo

Id: zlLTz1p19DQ

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024