A personal view of coming late to flight test and with a novel large aircraft

Andrew Barber BSc CEng MRAeS, Head of Airworthiness and Flight Test Engineer, Hybrid Air Vehicles Limited (United Kingdom)

Abstract

The Airlander is a Hybrid Aircraft, specifically a lifting-body design based on lighter-than-air technology. The author of this paper is Head of Airworthiness at HAV and also a FTE who was deeply involved with the flight test programme in 2016-2017, including flying as LFTE on the final flight of the prototype Airlander. Since 2017, HAV has won its first customers for Airlander. One customer is an established airline that will provide mass public transport in an EU country to create, with existing technologies, very low-carbon Commercial Air Transport routes.

This paper shares knowledge from my experiences of becoming a FTE late (aged 48) and by a non-conventional route. It then considers how HAV will rebuild its six years dormant flight test organisation to fly a test programme for a full type certificate and for a geographically wide-ranging role-proving programme under the UK CAA regulatory regime while designing and building a novel, large and complex transport aircraft with capabilities including IFR, flight in known icing and elective shut-down and restart of the propulsion engines.

HAV will operate flight test under UK law (similar but not identical to EU), with reference to EASA and FAA guidance for aeroplanes and helicopters but adapted for our novel aircraft. To assure best practice, we study flight test from the Wright Brothers to the foundation of ETPS to Mercury to V22 to F35 to eVTOL.