Hill Helicopters HX50

[Cyclic Hotline]

Originally Posted by Bell_ringer

I would love to see the maths going into Hughes mantra of a 180 squid turbine wheel.
I am sure if you ignore a lot of associated cost that could well be a number but one disconnected from reality.
Considering the money Hill is currently burning, that is a lot of indirect cost that his cheap engine will inherit.
I have no doubt he will eventually get his motor running, whether it will live up to the promises and how safe it will be, remains to be seen.
I would also suggest that the order book exists for the same reason fanboys queue outside an apple store for a new device - fomo, and the hope of making a buck from being early.

I'm in complete concurrence with you, Bell_ringer. Having significant visibility to OEM and PMA manufacturing and contemporary manufacturing vendor pricing and capacity, it is totally ridiculous to claim that you could manufacture a RR M250 turbine wheel for £180 ($200 USD). Anyone making that claim has absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Take a look at what they are talking about, and tell me if you disagree? And that is for the manufacture alone, let alone the cost of design, materials, static and dynamic testing, manufacturing tools and tooling, quality, certification and then test and certification on the entire engine, prior to entering the actual flight test phase. I'll let you use your own cost assessment to meet these requirements. The OEM Margin is one of the areas subject to total manipulation, and is extremely high, until you consider all the other unrelated overhead involved in the business from Corporate to Insurance, and everything in between. The OEM margin is what drives the aftermarket PMA suppliers, many of whom simply use the exact same vendor as the OEM to manufacture their parts to their approved PMA design.

Maybe he means a first stage Compressor wheel, and that would be a similar challenge.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the Hill HX50 concept and some very interesting ideas that can be brought into a clean sheet design, but it is entirely that - a concept, so don't confuse it with the real world. If there are similar manufacturing pricing assumptions throughout the entire programme (and there are a lot of parts in a new helicopter), then I'm concerned that it will never reach production (or maybe even the prototype stage), and certainly, never be available for the currently suggested selling price.