Robinson Unveils the R88, Its Largest-ever Helicopter
Category:NewsClean-sheet design offers twin-engine performance in a single-engine aircraft.
In a departure from its light-helicopter roots, Robinson Helicopter has introduced the next helicopter in its product line: the 10-place single-engine turbine R88, a clean-sheet design with a new type certificate. First flight could come as early as this year, with certification and service entry to follow later this decade. The company is already booking orders for the $3.3 million R88.
With a 275-cu-ft cabin capable of carrying up to eight passengers or 1,800 pounds of payload with full fuel, R88 missions will include aerial firefighting, air medical transport, utility work, and passenger transport and the cabin will be reconfigurable for various mission types.
Until the R88 enters service, the Torrance, California company’s largest helicopter is the five-seat R66, powered by a 300-shp Rolls-Royce turboshaft. The R88’s engine is a Safran Helicopter Engines Arriel 2W capable of producing 1,000 shp.
“We like to surprise the market,” Robinson Helicopter president and CEO David Smith told AIN. “It’s quite a large aircraft and is everything that Part 27 can offer in a single-engine package, with cabin capacity and performance consistent with many twins.
“This opens a lot of doors, and it’s more than the next class above the R66. I feel like we hit a sweet spot, [in terms of] economics, it’ll run at an affordable rate and can be acquired at an affordable rate and missionized at an affordable rate. It’s larger than a seven-seat aircraft and in the same range of cabin and payload as you get with twins.”
Robinson engineers have been heavily working on the R88 for the past two years, and developing the helicopter was one of the objectives for Smith when he took over leadership of the company from Kurt Robinson in February 2024. “We talked to a lot of customers,” he said, “and asked what they needed. It’s been a big part of our engineering focus.”
The R88 carries on Robinson’s two-blade teetering main rotor system with bonded metal blades but with a slightly higher disc loading, Smith said. “This is a fresh look at our two-blade architecture.”
Its blades maximize the benefits of new components, tip shapes, and noise treatment to deliver additional performance and a lower noise footprint. The tail rotor will continue company founder Frank Robinson’s specialty of high margins in all sorts of wind conditions. “That’s what customers expect from us,” Smith said.
One Robinson characteristic that is common to the R22, R44, and R66—the teeter bar single-post cyclic control—will not appear on the R88. The R88’s cyclics will be traditional dual controls, mounted like most helicopters on the floor in front of each pilot.
“It’s a huge deal,” Smith said of the departure from the teeter bar design. “The reason why is the physics of the aircraft. It is a very wide aircraft, so to get a teeter bar to work in the geometry, it just didn’t work. It was too large and the height was too high, so it didn’t make sense.”
Smith said engineers explored variations of a single-post dual control, but “pretty quickly we settled in that this was going to need a dual cyclic setup [because] of physics, not out of preference.” A benefit of this design is that each front seat’s controls can be removed for passenger carriage.
The R88 shares the structural architecture of its siblings, with a welded steel frame, aluminum skin, and few titanium parts. The R88 will employ more use of carbon-fiber composites because those parts will be thick enough where carbon-fiber is justified compared to fiberglass. Flight controls will feature dual hydraulics for pitch and roll control.
Eighty percent of buyers select stronger windshields on the R66, so impact-resistant windshields certified to Part 29 transport helicopter requirements will be standard on the R88. “The thinking is that if we if we give people that as a standard feature, then no one has to choose [between] weight or safety or cost or safety,” he said.
“It’s simply in the design. We’ll give them industry-leading performance with industry-leading safety, and they don’t have to choose. Very few people have Part 27 aircraft with bird-strike windows. I want that to be one of many things that Robinson is known for. It’s lighter, it’s more affordable, and it’s now standard. That’s something that I think our competition should look at and try to up their game because bird strikes do kill people every year.”
While the Safran Arriel engine for the R88 will require certification, this is an update to an existing model, mostly involving Fadec software. Power will be derated to leave some margin, he said, “so we aren’t living at the redline.”
At the aft end of the R88 fuselage, a fold-down rear entry door will make it easier to load medevac patients on stretchers. Rear doors will be sliding units.
IFR capability will be an available option, according to Smith. Cruise speed isn’t yet revealed but will be “plenty fast for this market,” he said. “It isn’t a critical parameter.”
More important is how quickly pilots can start and shut down the R88. “We want systems to be smart, simple, lean, and quick to boot up and get in the air, and the same thing for shutdown and exit,” Smith noted.
As for maximum weight, he said, “We’re not talking about gross weights directly right now, but the big picture of this aircraft is you’ll have the option for a 3,000-pound external load hook, and that’ll be a human external cargo-rated hook. And so that gives you a sense of how much it can lift, just by itself. It’s going to be a massive aircraft that’s above an [Airbus] AStar and in the range of a [Bell] 429-, [Airbus] H135-category performance.”
Range is projected at more than 350 nm and endurance will be more than 3.5 hours. Other options include a utility basket, wire-strike protection kit, and pop-out floats. Buyers can opt for high skids for increased ground clearance and firefighting water tank compatibility.
Maintenance for the R88 will replicate the typical Robinson periodic overhaul system, where the helicopter goes back to the factory or qualified service centers for a heavy maintenance event.
The first R88 flight test article is under construction. “We are working hard to fly as soon as possible,” Smith said. “If it flies this year, that will be a real success for the team. But I think the more reasonable approach is maybe a little bit beyond that.” Some pacing items include the first time Robinson is working with Safran on an engine and the fully integrated Garmin avionics suite.
“It’s an engine that we know very well from the industry. It’s a unique variant for us but it is very a stable core engine to work from,” he said. A service program from Safran is included with each R88, covering unscheduled removals for five years or 2,000 flying hours (whichever comes first), premium health monitoring, and advanced digital services.
The Garmin suite features touchscreen G500H TXi displays that include a crew alerting system, GTN navcoms, and a standard four-axis Garmin autopilot. The autopilot includes level mode, hover assist, limit cueing, and low-/high-speed protection.
A health usage monitoring system and data recording with datalink are also standard. “We’re not asking Garmin to do anything super out of the ordinary,” Smith said, “so we’re hoping that these things have de-risked the schedule and we can fly very quickly.”
“Certification for us is a relatively fast process,” he said. After the first flight, certification takes 2.5 to four years for a typical Robinson program. “The R66 was a fairly quick turnaround, roughly three years to get to certification from the initial flight. In this design, we intentionally chose design features that kept the risk level low from a certification standpoint. We don’t require [special] rulemaking at any substantial level.”
Robinson opened the R88 order book during the unveiling on Sunday evening, and potential customers are encouraged to talk to their R66 dealers to place deposits to hold an R88 position. Smith anticipates that the R88 will bring new customers to the Robinson family and that some may elect to buy an R44 or R66 while waiting for the R88, which starts at $3.3 million for the standard configuration.
Launching an entirely new aircraft program “is the second-best thing we do in aviation,” Smith concluded. “The first best is first flights, but that’ll come soon enough. The team has put a lot of work into this, and I think it’s great to have great partners with Safran and Garmin.”
