Development

The NEO is a new 2 persons helicopter in development by Youngcopter in Germany. The first public display was at the ILA-Helitech center in June 2008. In the same year the first ground trails began. During the pwoering-up and hovering power level no possible reonance problems occur. After that the fine tuning op the rotor system and controles has been conducted. In the year 2009 very detailed development is made to an effective and efficient interaction of the hole system. During all these tests no accidents or damages are made.

The NEO has a similar, but nogt the system, as the NOTAR for MD Helicopters; it is called Jet Control Systems (JCS). The powerplant is a liquid cooled 180 HP rotory engine (also known as wankel-engine) which uses "super-benzine" or mogas (motor gasoline). The chose of the three blade rotor system is made for the easier handling of the helicopter incompare of a two blade rotor system Besides easier handling the chose a three blade rotor because of a lower vibration level in cruise flight, more safety by reducing low-G issues and lower noise.

During development of the intensive use of modern and up-to-date technologies in the fileds of the airframe, rotor, powerplant and control system made more effort than originally thought. In this process even small changes are often follwed by further time cosuming changes. One of the latest tasks was the dynamic tuning of the rotor system. This is achieved on the end of 2010. The rotor is now running at a very low vibrationlevel and the cyclick stick is almost free of vibration. For the first time there is made an huge achievement that after assembly of the blades the rotor could go into operation without further track and balace corrections.

The last step will be the working of the most efficient coordination of the jet control system at the tail.

Maiden flight

On October 31, 2011 NEO left the ground taking off to its first test flight at Mainz Airfield, Germany. After more than ten years of development a dream became reality.With this first flight the project reached the most significant milestone and the NEO project is now entering a new phase. As part of the certification prgram NEO now has to fulfill numerous tests on the ground and in the air. This effort will be considerable and in spite of many inquireies, it is still not possible to plan the productiondate for starting production of the kits.

The first flight and the subsequent second flight were used to qualitatively assess stability and control properties of the helicopter. As expected, the rotor is very responsive and aslo for yaw control the Jet Control System (JCS) requires small inputs only.

Technical data