persil
All rotorcraft enthusiast
Good day my friends. I am creating this thread in order to fill a little gap I am facing recently. There is a very nice thread on little-known American helicopters, where people share their findings on various designs.
For roughly 10 to 15 years, maybe 20, the situation in China regarding helicopters, for me, closely resembles what happened in the 1950’s in the US, or actually in the so-called Western World. I mean here a huge number of companies popping out everywhere which deal with helicopter manufacturing - mainly small ones. There is a difference though to the 1950’s. These new Chinese companies rarely have an indigenous project or some single clever man behind the project (designer) - as was the case in most of the American companies in the 1950’s - at least this is how I receive the available information. But the amount of projects and companies is no doubt resembling those golden days. The Chinese companies either buy some already established helicopter (or engine) project or invest heavily in such a project (in effect taking control over it) and creating production facilities in China with the hope of soon to be started production, and of course with a big PR campaign in Chinese media.
This has significant implications for companies in for example Europe - I can pop out of my sleeve a couple of names which were developing helicopters in Europe, Chinese investors came in, and 2-3 years later such a company disappears. Frankly, I was even employed by one of such companies.
On the other side - quite similar things were happening to the companies in the US in the 1950's. They were founded, they were designing and building prototypes, money was drying up, the company was bought by some other, bigger one, and so on.
Anyway, my intent by making this thread is to keep track of these companies and their products as it happens right now. Also, I hope this thread will help name at-the-moment-mysterious to me and other helicopters which originate in China and provide more data on them for future researchers. This thread does not limit itself strictly to Chinese helicopters, but it may also contain information on projects with Chinese investment and thus most likely having existing or future Chinese production facilities.
It is important to provide (if possible) the original Chinese name (in Chinese letters or the name as used by the Chinese company itself) so it will be easy for others to go and dig deeper - and hopefully enlarge the knowledge of all of us. The same applies to its English versions - these days many of these companies have their webpages multilingual - although they are not easy to find - if you know such a page, share the link to it here, and Chinese and English names should come from that very page.
It will be also helpful to connect the dots between companies - they often get renamed or bought by another one, but still work on the same projects (maybe its name is also changed), but in essence it is worth noting which helicopter project originates, or is a consequence of what. Often one company is a subsidiary of the other one and in effect sometimes both names are used as manufacturer name - this is also worth noting.
In the following posts I put some information on a couple of projects which just within recent days wasted some of my time
Hope you join the party.
For roughly 10 to 15 years, maybe 20, the situation in China regarding helicopters, for me, closely resembles what happened in the 1950’s in the US, or actually in the so-called Western World. I mean here a huge number of companies popping out everywhere which deal with helicopter manufacturing - mainly small ones. There is a difference though to the 1950’s. These new Chinese companies rarely have an indigenous project or some single clever man behind the project (designer) - as was the case in most of the American companies in the 1950’s - at least this is how I receive the available information. But the amount of projects and companies is no doubt resembling those golden days. The Chinese companies either buy some already established helicopter (or engine) project or invest heavily in such a project (in effect taking control over it) and creating production facilities in China with the hope of soon to be started production, and of course with a big PR campaign in Chinese media.
This has significant implications for companies in for example Europe - I can pop out of my sleeve a couple of names which were developing helicopters in Europe, Chinese investors came in, and 2-3 years later such a company disappears. Frankly, I was even employed by one of such companies.
On the other side - quite similar things were happening to the companies in the US in the 1950's. They were founded, they were designing and building prototypes, money was drying up, the company was bought by some other, bigger one, and so on.
Anyway, my intent by making this thread is to keep track of these companies and their products as it happens right now. Also, I hope this thread will help name at-the-moment-mysterious to me and other helicopters which originate in China and provide more data on them for future researchers. This thread does not limit itself strictly to Chinese helicopters, but it may also contain information on projects with Chinese investment and thus most likely having existing or future Chinese production facilities.
It is important to provide (if possible) the original Chinese name (in Chinese letters or the name as used by the Chinese company itself) so it will be easy for others to go and dig deeper - and hopefully enlarge the knowledge of all of us. The same applies to its English versions - these days many of these companies have their webpages multilingual - although they are not easy to find - if you know such a page, share the link to it here, and Chinese and English names should come from that very page.
It will be also helpful to connect the dots between companies - they often get renamed or bought by another one, but still work on the same projects (maybe its name is also changed), but in essence it is worth noting which helicopter project originates, or is a consequence of what. Often one company is a subsidiary of the other one and in effect sometimes both names are used as manufacturer name - this is also worth noting.
In the following posts I put some information on a couple of projects which just within recent days wasted some of my time
Hope you join the party.
