Georgina Hunter-Jones/Saladillo
The Cicare SVH-3 simulator could revolutionise the light helicopter industry, as Frank Robinson did in the 1980s with his R22, by completely changing the way people think about helicopter training.
First shown at the Helicopter Association International's Heli Expo in Dallas, USA, in 1999 and then at FIDAE 2000 in Santiago, Chile, 15 SVH-3s have been sold, with the company talking about 50 confirmed orders. However, the influence of the purchasers is more significant than the number sold.
Interested parties include the Argentine police force and army, the Omani air force, the Brazilian directorate general of civil aeronautics, the Turkish, Swiss and Austrian military, the South African Civil Aviation Authority and schools in Europe, Latin America, the USA and the UK.
The SVH-3 is the creation of Argentinian helicopter designer Augusto Cicare, who has been designing helicopters since the 1950s. When he was 18, he built his first helicopter using an article in New Scientist magazine. He had never seen a full-sized helicopter close-up and knew nothing of washout, drift or unsymmetrical lift, but had some knowledge of torque from reading about the helicopter designer Sikorsky.
After many mishaps - including a first machine which turned over and a second with an engine too weak to lift the body - he finally created the CH-1, a mechanical single-seat helicopter, with counter-rotating propellers to compensate for the torque and powered by his own home-built engine. Using this machine, Augusto taught himself to fly by tethering the skids to the ground, first with a plank and a large screw, and later, as he got more experienced, with wires. Cicare went on to design other types of helicopter. When his son turned 17, he too wanted to learn to fly. The family were not rich and lessons in Argentina were expensive, so Cicare used his experience to help his son learn safely without an instructor. The result is the Cicare SVH-3, a cross between a tethered helicopter with wide skids and a simulator.
Three-Dimensional Base
The SVH-3 uses a full-sized fibreglass, single-seat helicopter, attached to a hydraulically operated three-dimensional base. The base can be fixed to the ground (for initial lessons) allowing the helicopter to go up and down and do spot turns without moving forwards or backwards.
Once the student has mastered these movements, the base is released from its ground screw and the helicopter plus base can move forward, backwards and sideways, although never above a skid height of three feet.
The wide skids allow the student to make mistakes, to lose yaw control and to drop to the ground without damaging the helicopter or the student being hurt.
The instructor stands outside the helicopter and talks to the student by radio. He carries a remote control with which he can implement surprise engine and tail rotor failures in the hover, he also carries a Ocar key-ring type back-up in case the remote control fails, for extra safety.
Gisela Felici, a commercial pilot instructing on the SVH-3 at FIDAE 2000 earlier this year, explains: "The advantage of this invention is that the student can make mistakes and see their consequences without doing any damage. He knows he is in control of the helicopter and flying himself because the instructor is outside the helicopter. Also the instructor is free to teach via the radio, rather than having to fly the machine and teach at the same time."
A student confirmed this: "At first I forgot which pedal to put in and we whizzed around to the right. The instructor killed the engine with her remote control and we landed back on the tarmac. Thank God for wide skids. Next time I took it a bit slower. I guess I was hovering in about an hour."
After approximately 4h of tethered flight the student should be able to move onto a conventional helicopter and hover immediately. The SVH-3 can be detached and fly independently but most students move on to an R22 or another training helicopter.
Carlos Boniforti, second chief of operations with the Argentine police, which uses the SVH-3 in its training school, says, "Our students spend 12-16h in the simulator and then move directly onto the Eurocopter BO105. Before having the SVH-3 we used to train initially on a Hillier UH12ET. The SVH-3 is more efficient and saves money." He would, though, prefer a turbine engine in the simulator to make the conversion to the BO 105 easier.
For a student, learning to fly on the SVH-3 means less time spent learning to hover, which allows more time on advanced exercises such as autorotation, sloping ground and confined areas. If, as is already the case in Argentina, Chile and South Africa, the national aviation authorities allow 5-7h on the simulator to count towards the private pilot's license (PPL) this will mean a considerable drop in the price of a helicopter licence. For a school, the simulator means low costs and more profit while still charging the student less money and hence having a strong competitive edge.
Richard Sidebottom, an instructor at Addison Airfield in Texas which had the first SVH-3 in the USA, tells of a student who spent 40h learning to hover on a Schweizer 300 and still had not mastered the art. Instructors put her in the SVH-3 as a last resort, and, to their surprise, she mastered the hover in a couple of hours. He says, "If we hadn't had the simulator, I think she would eventually have given up and never learnt to fly." ME2, the company marketing the SVH-3, is looking both at training schools and at using the simulator for corporate events.
Gary McCormack, ME2's managing director, says Cicare will soon have a permanent base under the name of Easy Copter at Brynkinalt, Wales, and hopes to have permanent sites by September or October.
Andrea Bartl, a helicopter PPL license holder flying the machine at Brynkinalt for a Swiss company that is interested in the machine, says, "The hardest thing was the throttle control. Those of us who learnt on a R22 are used to governors and so the rpm control took some time to get used to. Still I'll now have less trouble converting to a Bell 47."
Family Business
The drawbacks to the SVH-3 lie in the nature of the company itself. Cicare started as a family business, using friends and doing all production on site in two hangars. It originally produced nine helicopters, most of which went to schools in South America. Then in May 1999, Augusto Cicare won the Gold Medal for Invention in the OP1 27th Salon International des Inventions category (transport, aviation, nautical inventions) in Geneva, where he represented Argentina in the competition.
While there, the SVH-3 drew McCormack's attention. He decided to market the company commercially and believed he needed more than the nine simulators that the company had so far produced, so he pushed the company into farming out much of its production work across Argentina.
Production has increased to three helicopters a month with a possible further increase to five. Even that, though, will not be enough if the SVH-3's popularity increases. Robinson, for example, produces around 150 R22s per year. McCormack says, "We have various ideas and I am not worried about production. We have several possible alternatives that will lead to an increase."
The Cicare SVH-3 costs $100,000 - including the helicopter and the base - and requires a major overhaul every 4,000 flying hours. This gives a running cost with fuel and maintenance of around $30 an hour. In Texas, the school using the SVH-3 charges $75 per hour for training - a considerably cheaper educational tool than flying a conventional helicopter at a training rate of $200 per hour.
Insurance companies might well take into account the time students can spend on advanced exercises such as autorotation when training fees fall within an affordable range.
If insurance becomes cheaper, helicopter flying itself should become cheaper and that in itself will have considerable repercussions on the industry which cannot be discounted. This depends, however, on whether the company can produce enough simulators to fill their orders for helicopters or simulators.
Only that will change this from a family business into a viable market alternative in helicopter training.
Source: Flight International