Rotorcraft Repair and Manufacturing: Maintaining the leading edge

The rotor blades on a brand-new helicopter are clear and pristine, with an optimized lift-generating airfoil that completely slices by the air.

Put that plane into service on agricultural, firefighting, or navy missions, and the blades will rapidly present the results of flying in a harsh atmosphere.

“The forefront of the blade turns into beat up and eroded, and then you definitely not have a pleasant, stunning airfoil,” defined Seth Hardage, proprietor of Rotorcraft Restore and Manufacturing in Pocohontas, Arkansas. “It impacts how the helicopter will fly — it’s going to not fly good and easy. It makes the blades not observe as properly, and over time, it’s placing further stress on the engine so that you’re additionally utilizing extra gasoline.”

With many years of expertise in overhaul and restore of rotor blades, to deal with the issue, Rotorcraft has quietly developed a sophisticated blade erosion and corrosion safety coating.

Rotorcraft’s proprietary Dragon Pores and skin Xtreme — DSX — underwent six years of rigorous testing earlier than receiving Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approvals in 2012. Since then, in a cautious rollout, Rotorcraft has made DSX accessible to a choose group of shoppers.

“We wanted to let it exit and fly. We didn’t wish to inform lots of people about it till we knew it might final many, many hours,” Hardage stated.

And on this prolonged area check, DSX has exceeded his expectations.

“We’ve seen greater than 3,000 hours of exhausting flying on a helicopter, and whereas DSX does put on, it wears so evenly that it at all times retains an ideal airfoil. It’s very uncommon to have a coated blade come again. We’ve solely seen them return with some sort of injury elsewhere on the blade,” Hardage stated. “We’ve had a few clients the place the blade is flown out of its life restrict, and I’ve purchased the blade again so I might see how the coating did over all that point.”

Based on Hardage, DSX may be simply utilized through the time {that a} blade is in his store for overhaul.

“There are a number of further steps we’ve got to take, however not something main.”

A long time of expertise

Rotorcraft overhauls or repairs a median of 350 blades per yr, starting from the classic wood blades on a traditional Bell 47 to the large rotors from a Boeing Chinook.

With a mixture of work — 60 p.c on metallic blades and 40 p.c on composite ones — Rotorcraft’s bread-and-butter is rotors from Airbus and Bell mild and medium helicopters.

When a blade comes within the door, Hardage and his workforce get to work, first with an in depth preliminary inspection.

“I’m very wanting to get the paint and end eliminated as a result of it might conceal a whole lot of issues. I spend a whole lot of time trying on the blade’s construction, a whole lot of time making an attempt to know what the blade goes by, and I have in mind what this blade is doing for a dwelling, what they’re doing with this plane,” Hardage stated. “I do know what to search for.”

As a part of its restore course of, the corporate can carry out a full vary of non-destructive blade inspections, together with x-ray, borescope and eddy present testing.

If required, Rotorcraft attracts on its in-house engineering workforce to develop restore processes and procedures to submit for FAA approval.

However it’s the corporate’s institutional information that provides it a bonus in its operations, going again to the unique homeowners — the Propst brothers.

Having operated Bell 47s for crop dusting and forestry work, the three brothers realized an enormous time financial savings by doing their very own blade work, slightly than having to ship the blades out for restore.

“In the event that they needed to pull the blades off, then their helicopter was down, and it might take months and months to get the blades carried out. So, in 1992, they opened their very own blade restore station in Black Rock, Arkansas.”

Drawing on relationships with unique engineers from Bell — together with William Underhill and Herb Waldrup, the lads who developed Bell principal rotor blades — Rotorcraft gained a lot of its information and expertise.

That benefited Hardage when he started working with the Propst brothers in 2018, which led to his buy of Rotorcraft in 2020, and a transfer in 2021 to a 40,000-square-foot (3,716-square-meter) constructing in Pocohontas, the place he and his household have their roots.

A private connection

Rotorcraft’s success has been pushed by its relationships with its clients, and word-of-mouth suggestions proceed to carry new enterprise to the corporate.

“When somebody calls, I wish to get to know them. They’re placing a whole lot of belief in me. I’m going to be engaged on one thing the place lives are on the road,” he stated.

It’s essential for Hardage to take care of these robust relationships, which he does with visits to his purchasers.

“I perceive we’ve received these new applied sciences, however face-to-face and previous handshake goes a lot additional.”

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