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Heli-Expo 2010: Why making helicopters greener could be as easy as ABCDE
Eurocopter is suggesting an industry standard method for measuring noise and emissions.
As part of its Bluecopter technology work, the company has followed the style of other industries, including the car and household appliance industry, by scoring the noise and emissions of its helicopters.
Those aircraft with ultra low emissions and noise would be be rated A+ or A while the noisiest, most polluting aircraft would score an E.
Speaking at Heli-Expo, Jean-Michel Billig, EVP of Research and Development at Eurocopter, urged the helicopter industry as a whole to try and adopt such a scheme. He said: 'This system is one criteria among others, the helicopter industry cannot escape these concerns about global warming and the greenhouse effect.'
He said he hoped that such a scheme would further trigger greater research and development into greener, less noisy aircraft at a time when there was ever increasing public scrutiny into how helicopters were being used.
Creating such a system has proved a challenge, particularly when it came to examining and fairly measuring the level of emissions. In terms of helicopter noise, Eurocopter was able to use the current ICAO standards, which vary according to aircraft weight. However, in terms of emissions, the many different phases of flight a helicopter goes through during a mission means that emissions over distance would not provide a accurate figure, as it does on fixed-wing types.
So Eurocopter settled on calculations based on different flight phases such as hover, best endurance speed and cruise flight at 120 knots. Emissions based on per kg of useful load was also measured. Data from the company suggests a helicopter spends an average of 10 % of its flight regime in the hover, 60 % at 120 kts and 30 % at that best endurance speed.
Eurocopter has only measured its helicopter family so far and plans to make the information on its aircraft publicly available, but changes to the system will be required if it is taken up by the industry as a whole. For example it is clear that not all helicopters can fly at 120 kts, which one of the measurements requires, and this may require an alternative set of criteria which takes into account lighter helicopter types.
Eurocopter's own family of machines scored mainly B's and C's in terms of noise and emissions, although of note was a D scored for the emissions from the AS355 Twin Squirrel.
Similar schemes have been used in aviation before. Regional airline Flybe introduced such a scheme to tell passengers just how green or ungreen the aircraft they were about to book a flight on actually was.
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