You can follow everything, and it’s easy to understand. Gensse likes to demonstrate how the design improves the pilot and passenger experience, going from dark cockpit to engine startup and ready for takeoff in less than two minutes. “With less actions, there are less mistakes, but you also save time,” he said. That allowed designers to improve the pilot’s field of view for looking outside but also helps lower the number of pilot actions required, which benefits training and safety. The goal was to remove and simplify the controls, switches, and knobs, Gensse explained.
But at the same time, Airbus designers paid a lot of attention to the flight deck design. This key feature fits with Airbus’s philosophy of making its helicopters easier to fly and requiring less training. With hands off the controls, that just results in the helicopter maintaining the same flight path and airspeed. In hands-on mode, the pilot can make the H160 do anything the helicopter can do, but the autopilot is still on. Also known as a fly-through autopilot, the AFCS remains on all the time in the H160. That makes flying the H160 much easier and allows the pilot to attend to other tasks without worrying about ending up in an unusual attitude. The H160, which is equipped with Airbus’s Helionix avionics package with weather radar, synthetic vision, moving map, TCAS II, and HTAWS, builds on the H175’s automatic airspeed and flight path stability. Most are linked to human factors, and it was a big part of our innovation to try to develop automation that is more simple and intuitive for pilots with less experience.”
“We spent a lot of energy to find a new answer for incidents and accidents. “I hope it will be a big step for us too,” he said. Olivier Gensse, Airbus’s H160 experimental flight test pilot, was instrumental in the design and testing of the H160’s AFCS. The H160 Helionix avionics design maximizes the outside view so pilots can focus on flying safely.