Successfully completing phase one of what will be the world’s first civil certification of a tiltrotor aircraft, veteran convertiplane pilot Roy Hopkins recently found himself in possession of something he hadn’t had much of in the last few months: spare time. Plans announced before the first flight of the Bell/Agusta BA609 called for a near-total teardown of the first flight-test prototype following what was expected to be that aircraft’s first 20 flight hours of function-and-reliability tests. After that, several months would go by before the test program was resumed using the modified prototype-one BA609 and the first of an expected three additional prototypes.
“We managed to accomplish all of the flight-test goals we had budgeted for the first 20 hours of flight in just 14 hours,” said Hopkins, the 56-year-old Bell test pilot who, through his experience in flight test of the XV-15 testbed and V-22 Osprey, has logged slightly more than 1,000 flight hours in tiltrotors (both actual and simulated), the highest total of its type on record. “Those 14 hours of flight were logged during a total of nine flights between March 7 and April 14,” Hopkins reported, “and those flight tests followed 41 hours of ground runup tests.” Like all initial forays aloft in newborn rotorcraft, Hopkins and copilot kept their first flights conservative, but soon branched out into tilted nacelle flight while still in helicopter mode. So far a speed of 120 knots has been achieved in forward flight.
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