The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) approved the H160 in July 2020 and Airbus assumed the FAA would validate the aircraft’s European type certificate in a short timeframe and without requesting major clarifications—as is standard procedure under Bilateral Aviation Safety Agreement (BASA) between the EU and the U.S.
“It turns out in this particular instance that the FAA has opened a lot more topics than what we expected, and those topics are sometimes quite complex, sometimes not,” Armstrong remarked. The ability to go through all these technical discussions was “severely hampered” by the Covid-related travel restrictions, he said, describing efforts to reach understanding despite having very frequent video calls with the FAA as a “relatively painful process.”
Painstaking Line-by-line Process
One of the topics the FAA decided to scrutinize concerned the aircraft’s noise profiles. “This was certainly not expected. The H160 has the lowest noise profile of any helicopter in its class,” Armstrong noted. The noise topic appears all the more intriguing since U.S. authorities regularly lament the EU’s strict noise rules for aircraft operating at the bloc’s airports in the EU-U.S. open skies joint committee.
Gradually closing the many topics has been a “painstaking line-by-line process. We are confident we are reaching the end of that convergence process,” Armstrong said. “We now have to see exactly when it [FAA type certificate validation] happens,” he added, cautioning the company must remain “humble on exact dates at this point. We are in their [FAA] hands to some extent.”
