NHIndustries and its Partner Companies, AgustaWestland – Eurocopter – Stork Fokker, are proud to announce that the first Swedish Armed Forces serial production NH90 took to the air today at the Eurocopter Marignane facility in France.
The flight started at 13:15 and lasted 55 minutes. The NH90 was flown by:
- Philippe BOUTRY experimental test pilot,
- Denis TRIVIER flight test engineer,
- Jean-Claude RABANY flight engineer.
This is the fourth serial production NH90 leaving the ground, following the NH90s for Germany, Finland and Italy.
Sweden has ordered a total of 18 NH90s, all of them fitted with the High Cabin, of which 13 will be dedicated to Tactical Troop Transport (TTT) / Search And Rescue (SAR) missions and 5 to Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) missions.
The first Swedish NH90 will now stay in Marignane to qualify the High Cabin version and perform the integration of the mission system required by the customer. Thanks to a strong and reliable partnership between NHIndustries and FMV (Swedish Defence Material Administration), this system developed by the Saab Group will be profitably fitted and qualified by Eurocopter.
In addition to the already well-known outstanding features of any standard NH90 (full Fly-By-Wire flight control system, full composite crashworthy airframe, full aircraft/avionics/mission system integration and state-of-the-art system suite available for multirole operation and multi-national cooperation in the modern military scenario), the Swedish NH90 introduces to the world the first high cabin version of the NH90. By adding 24 centimetres to the standard version cabin height, the NH90 High Cabin version offers a cargo volume increased by 2.5 additional cubic meters for a total of 17.50 cubic meters. Especially, the 1.82 m overall height allows any cabin crew (Surgeons, medics, loadmasters, etc.) to perform their mission within a highly comfortable environment, ensuring hence highest rates of success notably as for SAR activity.
The four assembly lines based in Agusta, Eurocopter (in France and in Germany) and Patria (the Finnish contractor for Nordic NH90s production) are day-by-day getting up new achievements to cope with the impressive logbook of the NH90 Programme in Europe and overseas, reaching now a gross total of 443 NH90 including the existing 86 options and the Australian selection for 12.
