FRI Kiowa temporarily used by NASA

Bell OH-58C Kiowa (registration N173FR) is owned by Flight Research Inc. in Mojave (CA). The former US Army OH-58C (in use with the National Test Pilot School since 2012, former USAr registration still unknown) is scheduled to fly at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB (CA) during the Advanced Air Mobility project’s National Campaign’s NC Integrated Dry Run Test in December 2020.

The helicopter will act as a surrogate urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles for the project to baseline a flight test plan and anchor current FAA standards to understand how future industry partnership flight testing needs to evolve.

The data collected from three series of flight tests at Armstrong FRC will be looking at overall challenges the urban environment will present for future vehicles. Included in this analysis are vehicle characteristics, the interactions with a third-party airspace service provider, wind conditions, flight path angles, heliports, vertiports, current FAA tools, and navigation systems. This flight test series will continue into early 2021.

During the flight testing, the Kiowa test pilots will be flying their helicopter in ways based on how the project thinks eVTOLs will fly in the future. This includes flying terminal operations with representative real-time eVTOL flight plans and trajectories while testing interactions with a third-party airspace service provider.

In early October 2020, the project conducted connectivity and infrastructure flight tests with a NASA TG-14 glider aircraft (N856NA) to prepare for the December tests.

Photo by Flight Research Inc.