Oh dear. Well this is awkward.
Mike the BellBlade published the link to the article in COLLECTIVE Magazine written by one Ryan Mason. Now, I sort of "know" Ryan from the Facebook HPN page. He's a nice guy, and one hell of a photographer! But he's not an...actual...you know...pilot. No rating. Not even a student certificate. He's had some dual instruction, but apparently not enough to solo or get rated.
After he published that extensive article on the 505 in his magazine, I took him to task for not providing things like fuel burn, ride quality (comparative to its competitors), power vs. speed figures, cabin pitch attitude in cruise...you know...stuff that you'd expect to see in a normal pilot-report. I mean, after all, he flew it (or more correctly, flew *in* it) for FIVE HOURS. Surely he could've given us an idea of the fuel burn! But no. It was only then that Ryan admitted that he's not an actual...you know...pilot.
Oh.
But hey, that doesn't make his observations invalid. It simply means that he's not an experienced, qualified aircraft evaluator. And to his credit, he does sort of admit that a couple of times in the article. Fortunately he's a helicopter guy through-and-through – he loves these crazy contraptions as much as anyone. And he's flown *in* a bunch of helicopters.
But let's face it, like most people who get to fly a brand-new, mostly-newly-designed machine, he was "wowed" by all the gee-whiz stuff like the FADEC and Garmin G1000, both of which have been around long enough that guys like me aren't impressed anymore. (The G1000 debuted in 2007. It's old.) Maybe it was sensory-overload, I don't know. Not to put him down, but a guy like Ryan would probably get all giggly if he got some cross-country stick-time in an old UH-1 retrofitted with a G1000. I would too. But I'd keep my objectivity.
An admittedly-dated Garmin avionics suite doesn't do anything for the design of the aircraft; it just gives us more and (for some pilots) new toys to play with. And FADEC is nice, but it doesn't
really decrease the pilot's workload, come on, other than during the start. The easily-impressed will say,
"Oooooh, but you won't have to monitor the RRPM so closely in flight!" Yeah you're right. And if you don't fly like Chuck Friggin' Aaron in his Bolkow you won't have to do that in your 206A either. Let's put it this way: In all my years of flying Bell 206's (which is more than three decades), I never considered the wandering MRRPM to be a nuisance or distraction. I don't pull or push faster than the torque gauge can move. If the RPM didn't stay within limits it got written up and the governor got changed.
Whatever...
Everyone seems impressed with the 505's performance. What...did Bell rewrite the laws of physics? IT'S A LONGRANGER! A short LongRanger, that is (Bell should have called it the SLR). Actually, it's a fairly weak, 500 h.p. LongRanger...kind of like an old L-1 with a slightly faster rotor.
“But the 505 is lighter!!” Well, maybe not *much* lighter. Again, the COLLECTIVE article failed to mention the empty weight of Steve Urschel's ship. But Bell says that the empty weight is 2,180 pounds, so let's go with that. Add 360 for the pax, 100 for the bags, and 575 for the fuel and we get...about 3,215 pounds, which is about 700 pounds or so heavier than the
empty weight of the L-1's I used to fly when I was at PHI. So again, not much lighter than an L-model. Maybe I'm misremembering that...I am getting old. Maybe they were 2,700 pounds. Still...with just me and some fuel, my PHI L-1 would weigh about the same as Urschel's 505.
People are trying to make this 505 out to be some new super-copter. Dear God, according to some, you'd think it was a civilian reincarnation of Airwolf! Time will tell. Eventually some 505's will be released here in the U.S. instead of all of them oddly being sent overseas first. Eventually one will be flown by an actual pilot with actual experience in objectively evaluating aircraft (like Guy Maher's piece in VERTICAL) and a GoPro focused on the panel. Maybe then we'll get some real-world, quantifiable numbers, not the breathless, “Oh-my-God, FADEC! The throttle's a toggle-switch!!!”
PR hype we've gotten so far.
Maybe.