Depends where you want to fl;y them really, but I like all the variants of the N model SA365.
From the pax viewpoint as a corporate machine it's nice and smooth, but the cabin is rather lacking in headroom except for the 2 rear facing passengers in the 5 seat VIP interior. It is possible to gain more room, but at the expense of range as it involves sacrificing some fuel tank space.
From the operating poi8nt of view they all have the same basic autopilot (perfectly adequate even in basic form) and pretty similar cruise sppeds, in the region of 150 knots in Europe. On hotter climes, the cruise spped does decrease a bit, but so does the fuel burn. Just to give you an idea, in the part of the world where I now operate (West africa) we use as basic block planning figures:
SA365N 130 kts Fuel burn 265 kg/hr
SA365N1 130 kts Fuel burn 275 kg/hr
SA365N2 135 kts Fuel burn 280 kg/hr
SA365N3 140 kts Fuel burn 305 kg/hr
The standard fuel tanks are the same for all variants, with a capacity of 915 kg, so you'll see that the N3 suffers a bit in terms of range - but it's wonderful in the mountains!!
Whe4n I started flying 365N series, all the new variants were SA365N... but some years later the new RFMs came out labelled as AS365.... For me, they all go in my logbook as SA365.... My 3 personal flight manuals from factory courses on N, N1 and N2 are all SA365....
But, I digress. I think it's a lovely pilots' machine and although probably not quite as good as the S76 from a passenger point of view in terms of cabin space, it's smoother, almost as fast, tough, low on maintenance and overall one of my favourite machines of all time
