Customer deliveries begin
Following three years of work, Skywheels LLC President Joe Covelli is pleased to share customer deliveries have begun. According to Joe, "Our first two customer orders have shipped from the factory, and we are now officially in the rotor blade business. It has been a strong team effort getting Skywheels back into manufacturing and on the market again for new rotor sales".
The effort represents a culmination of work to bring back one of the best - if not the best - gyroplane rotors engineered to date. Skywheels has had a loyal pilot following since 1985 when Founder Jim McCutchen first introduced them. The high-inertia design favors performance, stability, predictability, and forgiveness. They are designed to exceed Federal Aviation Administration Regulation Part 27 (requirements for normal category rotorcraft).
Flight Tests and Process Improvements
Two pilots familiar with Skywheels flight-tested the new rotors during the summer and fall of 2020. "I've trained students on these blades for hundreds of hours over the years," CFI and Skywheels test pilot Greg Bradley said. "Man, they nailed it. These blades are a joy to fly."
Skywheels partnered with Blackhawk Aerospace in October 2019 to manufacturer the new rotors to the same high-quality standard as the original blades. According to the two test pilots, the new rotors met and exceeded the flight performance characteristics of the original blades.
As the Blackhawk team reviewed its processes, it realized the improvements were due to manufacturing hardware and software advancements. "The technology advancement that we see here is the precision and reproducibility of what's being made," said Bill Smrtic, Senior Manufacturing Engineering Tech at Blackhawk.
Rotor Spin Testing Upgrades To A Digital Platform
To adhere to Blackhawk's AS9100 aerospace quality control standards in having a means for documented testing, Skywheels and Blackhawk shared in the $40,000 investment to design and custom-make a new high-tech digital spin test platform. Bill said, "The most high-tech part on the original blade spin-up machine was a 2-foot long piece of 1/8-inch diameter all-thread (rod) extending down from below the rotor head you watched for vibration." The original test stand was built in the early 1980s and that's what they used at the time. It worked well over the years since over 3,000 blade sets were spin tested that way with passing results and a strong reputation for quality and performance.
With the new spin-up platform, dynamic rotor testing is consistently done at 300 rpm and can go as high as 420 rpm. The new rotors are optimally tracked and balanced to precision using mounted digital sensors and machine-learning computer software. Blackhawk has been working with the new equipment the past many months and seeing rotor spin-up numbers for various blade set lengths between .01 ips and .05 ips. For the rotor spin test, .1 ips is acceptable, and anything less is outstanding.
"Following an eighteen-year pause in manufacturing, it's a privilege to offer Skywheels rotors again to the sport-flying gyroplane market", said Joe.
Picture insert, Joe Covelli, left, and Bill Smrtic.
Portions of this article were written from "Classic Concept Meets Modern Manufacturing", author Beth E. Stanton, EAA Sport Aviation Magazine, May 2021.
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