Hill Helicopters: The Aston Martin of the Skies

“An automotive interior that looks like it’s been plucked out of the finest British coachbuilt cars”

In this episode of Third Angle, we explore the future of personal aviation with Hill Helicopters, a company aiming to redefine the helicopter industry with their groundbreaking designs. Discover how they combine sleek, luxury design with cutting-edge technology to create helicopters that are not only beautiful but incredibly easy to fly. Hill Helicopters’ ambition is to become the “Aston Martin of the skies,” making flying accessible to newcomers while maintaining top performance.

Chairman and Chief Engineer, Jason Hill, takes us behind the scenes at Hill’s brand-new, state-of-the-art production facility in Staffordshire, England. He shares his passion for aviation and explains how every component of their helicopters—from the engine to the cockpit—is designed, developed, and manufactured in-house. Jason also discusses their commitment to being carbon-neutral, and how they’re using biofuel to achieve sustainability in short-range flights.

Find out more about Hill Helicopters here.

Find out more about Creo and Windchill here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Helen Lennard. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we're taking a peek at the future of luxury aviation.

I'm your host, Paul Ames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world. Each powered by PTC technology. In this episode, we head to Staffordshire, England, home to Hill Helicopters.

They're setting new standards in the helicopter industry, combining cutting edge design with state of the art tech to create helicopters that are not only incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly easy to fly too. Their aim? To become the Aston Martin of the skies. The magic happens at their groundbreaking new production facility, PC1, where every component of their helicopters from the engine to the lavish cockpit is designed, developed, and manufactured.

Our producer, Helen Leonard, got the chance to visit this impressive 76, 000 square foot facility with Jason Hill, chairman and chief engineer. A lifelong helicopter enthusiast, Jason shares his passion for flying with the and explains how Hill Helicopters is leading the way in innovation, including their commitment to being carbon neutral.

Welcome to Hill Helicopters. I'm Jason Hill, the chairman and chief engineer of Hill Helicopters, the UK's newest manufacturer of light. biofuel powered turbine helicopters. This is PC one, a new 76, 000 square foot production facility here in the heart of Staffordshire, where we design, develop, manufacture and approve our whole aircraft, including the engine, the avionics and every single component inside it.

Production centre one is our It's the first fully vertically integrated,  manufacturing facility for producing the Hill HX 50 light helicopter. We have a composites manufacturing facility where we build carbon fiber aircraft fuselages, composite rotor blades for the main rotor system, we build crash worthy seats, we build our own gears, we build our own bearings, our own transmissions, we build our own turbine engine.

So it's from end to end everything that you need to be able to develop and produce a helicopter and gas turbine www. FEMA. gov

So Hill Helicopters was really formed to develop a modern, state of the art helicopter for light commercial applications and private owners. So people that want to fly themselves around either for fun or for their business. purposes and then like commercial users and really, although those sorts of aircraft existed, they were very much stuck in bygone decades.

The whole general aviation industry had been devoid of real innovation for many years, and that had opened up a gap and an opportunity for a new manufacturer to step in. And be able to produce a new product that was much more of the level of modern automotive products. So think of it as a flying supercar, something that was elegant and high performance and well equipped and appointed and attractive to bring new people back into flying again.

So the machine that you can see in front of you is the second of the two HX 50 prototypes. This one is,   in a striking good metal gray with a fixed skid undercarriage, and we intentionally designed the machine toe to look as organic and natural as possible. So as you look at it, it's got a very streamlined body.

With its horizontal and vertical stabilizers at the back, the tail rotor is elegantly built into the back of the tail fin to make it quieter and to be safer when you're operating in confined landing areas. All of the complex mechanical components that make the main rotor system work, the pitch links, the swash plates, the hydraulic servos, the control runs.

All of that is hidden away under elegantly sculpted cowlings that look much more like a shark's fin and anatomy than anything that's come out of an aircraft factory. And the reason we've done those things is firstly, it makes an incredible difference to the aerodynamics of the aircraft. It makes it much more streamlined.

But the key thing is even with really complex products, people still buy with their eyes. So it's important to make people want to buy our aircraft and to do that. We really needed to deliver a flying Aston Martin. We needed something that had got those timeless biological lines, elegant British styling, really high quality fit and finish, an automotive interior that looks like it's been plucked out of the finest British coach built cars, and then modern technology on the interior as well.

So this is the cabin of,  our second HX50 prototype. So what you can see in front of you is the, the cyclic control, which controls essentially which way the helicopter tips and then moves. The collective control here that looks like a handbrake. Think of that as an up and down lever. And then we've got two anti torque pedals down here, which basically control which way the nose points.

So you press the left one, the nose will turn left. Press the right one, the nose will turn right. Starting the helicopter is actually really simple as well. It's not dissimilar to your car. So we turn the master power on, turn our avionics on, which brings all of these screens to light, and then click the big red start button and it will fire up.

And then this little red button on the collective handle here. One of the things that we've done. Purposefully done with HX50 is designed this machine to be easy to fly. All helicopters are inherently unstable. The nature of them makes them unstable. And so modern technology allows us to use stability augmentation systems.

So we have some gyros in the background and some computers that take out all of that instability and make the machine fundamentally stable. So when you have got five  rugby players on board and a full tank of fuel and all that kit with them, you can still fly with enough power in hand to make everything that you'd want to do easy.

And around 20% of our customers are novices. They don't even have a license. So that's proof in its own right that,  we've inspired a new wave of people to come into general aviation and, and learn to fly that had had not previously been drawn by. So it's really reassuring to know that what we're doing is resonating with the target market.

General aviation used to be massive. In, if you take 1978, the year that I was born, the US manufacturers alone produced 18, 711 light four seat aircraft. That's almost as big as the supercar market is today. But by the early 1980s, And the industry struggled to make more than 1, 500 to 2, 000 aircraft reliably ever since.

And there's lots of very boring reasons why that's been the case. But the main one is the complete drought of innovation. The failure of the industry to keep up with the demands of the market means that the products Simply aren't good enough. You know, imagine trying to sell a ford cortina today. Nobody would buy it And that's really where the the genesis of hill helicopters came from we're really just about meeting our customers expectations and and giving them what they want for the the general aviation market and that will In time, we believe bring the whole Industry back to life again.

And again, modern technology now means that with cellulose based biofuels, we can run these aircraft 100 percent carbon neutral. So there is no negative impact on the environment by operating these. In an ideal world, we would be able to just say, let's go electric because it's clean. It's simple from our point of view, it would be more reliable and cheaper to make.

So we'd love to do that. I would have much rather have done that. But the simple fact of the matter is the best batteries that exist on planet earth today, even in a development stage have about two to 3 percent the energy density of jet fuel, right? So they simply. Cannot work in an aircraft you'd have an aircraft with two to three percent of the range Of an equivalent jet fuel powered helicopter or aeroplane It just does not work and it won't work in practice for a very long time So we can't just sit here and continue to burn fossil fuels that that would be irresponsible now While you couldn't use things like biofuels for large commercial air transport because you physically wouldn't be able to make enough of it for a very tiny market Like general aviation, where it's a small amount of aircraft that are very infrequently used, you're talking about 50 to a hundred hours a year.

Then you can source sufficient supply to use a biofuel. Now biofuel technology has evolved to the point where we can synthesize any kind of fuel that we want. So it's relatively easy to produce a bio source fuel and then convert that to a jet fuel substitute that's completely compatible. With conventional jet engines.

So these machines can genuinely be operated as cleanly as any of the alternative green vehicles that are being proposed.

Let me give you a quick tour around the rest of the factory, and I'll show you some of the other things that go into making the helicopter. So on this stand over here, you can actually see the main rotor gearbox.  And the centerpiece of the main rotor hub. So this is the thing that essentially allows the helicopter to fly in any direction.

And then over here, we way over here, we've got a cutaway section of our own gas turbine engines. This is the very first helicopter engine that's been designed in the United Complete in the UK since the 1980s. And I think the 1980s one was actually an Anglo French design as well. So this is a very big deal for a company to be developing whole engines in the UK.

If you look at this thing here, this is one of the original carbon shells. So this whole airframe here, which is about twice the length of a Range Rover weighs a hundred kilos. So it's incredibly light. This is, this is the magic of these modern materials. If you had to make a helicopter out of old metallic materials, aluminiums and steel tubes, you can still make really light structures, but they're very flimsy and they're very flexible.

The beauty of composites, it allows us to make stiff structures that look and feel strong, as well as being strong, and they have better fatigue properties, so they, they last a lot longer. They're just much more robust.

Yeah, I'm a bit of a tragic case, really. All I've ever wanted to do is build this helicopter. So I can remember as a teenage lad drawing pictures of a helicopter that looked like this and plotting on how I was going to be able to put myself in a position where I could do it. So I went off to university to do a mechanical engineering degree first and then went and did my PhD in computational helicopter aerodynamics.

I don't often Look back because there's always so much more to do, but we're sat here in inside the second prototype at the moment. And I think there's very few occasions as a, as an engineer, when you look at what you've done and it's come out better than you hoped it would. And HX50 is far more than I ever dreamed it would be.

It's an absolutely stunning piece of It's an amazing technical accomplishment.  I think we've done it in such a way that it'll age gracefully for 20 or 30 years. So I'm enormously proud. And bear in mind, these machines will still be in service when they're 50 years old. It's not like a car. This is another thing that people don't understand about aircraft and the overall carbon footprint of aircraft.

If you buy a new car and throw it away after five years, the carbon associated with its manufacture is huge in comparison to the carbon associated with its operation. And with an aircraft, these machines last five to ten times as long as cars. And so that's offset over a much greater period.

So this is our new aircraft. Precision machine shop. So as you can see around you,  we're, we're just constructing a mezzanine area. So this false floor you can see above us up at five and a half, six meters. We've put this in so that it brings down the cost of temperature controlling this whole environment because temperature controlling something as big as PC one would cost us an absolute fortune and we wouldn't need it.

for most of the space. So we've built this large room here to contain all of the five axis machines, all of the CNC machines, the precision grinding and wire cutting machines, our metrology lab for measuring all of our components, all of, and even the material stores for precision components. Everything in here is held strictly to 20 degrees and allowed to stabilize before we do anything.

Because these machines here are the ones that we use to produce. Turbine blades, precision gears, precision bearings, actuator and flight control components, all of the delicate precision metal work that goes into a helicopter right behind me here. You can see how the guys have been machining the final stages of a turbine blade for the engine.

And so all of these things are really sensitive to tolerances, to quality, surface finish, curvature, all of those sorts of things.

The aircraft industry is all about integrity. It's all about building a product that you're asking people to trust their life in, and trust the lives of everybody that they know and care about in. So, making sure the product's fit for purpose, making sure we've designed a machine that's really going to take care of the people that want to use it, and take account of their human frailties in the way they're going to behave.

We're all about supporting our customers, our staff, and our products. I've, I've flown helicopters for 25 years. I own a helicopter and I fly regularly with myself, my family. I do all of the things that I'm trying to convince people are great fun myself because I love them so much. It's an amazing experience.

It's an amazing view on the world. Flying,  The helicopter is, is like a magic carpet ride and,  there's nothing better than sharing the experience of helicopter flight with somebody for the first time.

That was Jason Hill from Hill Helicopters, giving us a glimpse into the future of personal aviation. Now let's hear from our expert, Brian from PTC. Brian, I know that Jason recognized early on that a coherent software strategy for product development and data management Was essential for Hill to ramp up quickly with a niche product focused on safe performance, sleek design, and top class services.

After the second designer joined Hill, the company put CREO and Windchill together and saw their design take flight. Are you able to give an overview as to how CREO aids in the design process of the helicopter? Going back to the 

beginning where they started with CREO after adding the second engineer to the team.

It brings to mind one of the first,  really, really important decisions they made was, was really about scalability. They, they started to add additional engineering capacity to the team, and,  they did it because they needed to scale the design significantly, and a helicopter's a very big, complicated piece of equipment.

And Creo was, you know, recognized as a great tool, a tool that was, you know, a little bit more capable than the tool they had already, in getting them all the way there to a complete helicopter design. So, It's really interesting to notice that once they started adding engineering talent to the team, but they wanted to collaborate broadly on many areas of the design at one time, they had to put in a CAD tool that could enable that kind of collaborative multi user workflow for something at the scale of a helicopter.

So when you look at the helicopter, you see really, really cool surfacing on the outside, and you know under the skin is some very complex mechanical, electromechanical design. And I think Creo is well known for being able to blend super cool, highly accurate, really nice surfacing with underlying mechanical design that's highly complex,  under the skin.

And so,  Helicopter being able to do all of that inside Creo is very, very valuable to blend the amazing, really necessary aesthetic of a helicopter to cut through the air. With, you know, the mechanical design of the gearboxes and engines and so forth. That's, that's, that's out of the hood. So that was really apparent and, and I think a significant advantage.

And along the way with something as complicated as, as a helicopter, you know, that simulation as part of the design process is also really important. And, you know, our partnership with Ansys is also known to have been a big draw for the Hill helicopter team and them being able to put. into the hands of their design engineers tools from the world's leader in independent simulation and ansys is a really really great draw we have those capabilities in creo to do structural thermal modal even cfd simulations right there inside creo and keep those up to date as the design evolves and so i think that's uh that's that's a really big draw for them as as well and you know i think I think lastly, it's, you know, it takes a lot of learning.

There's, there's a need for design engineers to slowly, but surely come up to speed on these capabilities. And we have really excellent integrated learning capabilities into Creo. And if, if customers like Hill need it. You can even link out to live instructor led training from inside Creo using the embedded browser or using the learning connector tied to Creo.

And so, really excited to see them take on some of the advanced capabilities, advanced servicing, advanced simulation, the usage of top down design techniques for something as large as a helicopter, and be able to learn on the fly. With our learn platform and, and integrated learning capabilities in Creo as they go and as they needed to, you know, access those more advanced capabilities.

A huge thank you to our expert, Brian, for sharing insights into the technology behind Hill Helicopters groundbreaking designs. And of course, special thanks to Jason Hill for the fascinating tour of the PC1 facility. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our bi weekly, 3rd Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes.

Companies that make products the world relies on, rely on PTC.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jackie Cook. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Helen Leonard. And music by Rowan Bishop.