Airbus Helicopters boasted about its 2016 achievements including the delivery of five percent more rotorcraft over 2015 and strengthening its civil and parapublic sales while maintaining its military market place, the company said Jan. 27.
The company delivered 418 helicopters in 2016 while their rotorcraft logged gross orders for 388 helicopters in 2016. This is a stable performance compared to 383 gross orders in 2015.
Airbus highlighted the 2016 bookings included 188 orders for light-single engine helicopters, 163 orders for the H135/H145 light-twin engine aircraft, and 23 orders for Super Puma family helicopters. At the end of 2016 the company’s overall backlog was 766 aircraft.
The company’s global fleet in 2016 consisted of about 12,000 helicopters in service with over 3,000 operators. Combined they reached 90 million flight hours, Airbus said.
The company also noted that on the military side the H225M was selected by Singapore and Kuwait while the H135/145 family was selected for the UK to be used in military flight training. Airbus also delivered the first AS565 MBe Panther naval rotorcraft to Mexico and Indonesia.
On the civil market side, the first H175 medium-twin helicopter in VIP configuration entered service in 2016 with the public services variant began flight-testing before certification set for 2017, a Chinese consortium ordered 100 H135s for local assembly over ten years, and the EASA granted certification of the Helionix-equiped H135.
“For the rotorcraft industry as a whole, 2016 was probably the most difficult year of the last decade. Despite this challenging market environment we delivered on our operational objectives and proceeded with the execution of our transformation plan,” Guillaume Faury, Airbus Helicopters CEO, said in a statement.