Tracking the helicopter certification slowdown: causes and consequences

If you joined the helicopter industry anytime this century, you have been waiting on certification of the first civil tiltrotor your entire career. Launched in the late 1990s, the Leonardo AW609, previously known as the Bell-Agusta BA609, has been flying in some form since 2003. More than 20 years later, it has yet to obtain type certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

This long gestation is due in part to the technical complexity of the fly-by-wire aircraft, which takes off and lands like a helicopter and cruises like an airplane. The program also suffered a major setback in 2015 when the second AW609 prototype crashed during high-speed flight testing in Italy, killing two test pilots. In recent years, however, most of the program’s delays have been associated with the certification process itself as Leonardo grinds through the testing and paperwork requirements imposed by the FAA.

The Bell 525 program hasn’t been around as long as the AW609, but it has been similarly mired in certification purgatory. Launched in 2012 as the world’s first commercial fly-by-wire helicopter, the transport category 525 made its first flight in 2015. It suffered its own fatal crash in Texas a year later, also during high-speed flight testing.

Bell paused 525 flight testing for a year to address the root causes of the accident; when flying resumed, then-CEO Mitch Snyder said the program was on track to achieve FAA certification in 2018. Since then, that target has been pushed back repeatedly, and certification was still pending as this article went to press.

With their continually slipping certification dates, the AW609 and Bell 525 have become emblematic of the challenges the rotorcraft industry faces in bringing radically new technologies to market. Yet, the industry’s certification challenges extend well beyond tiltrotors and fly-by-wire flight controls. Particularly in the U.S., original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have found it increasingly difficult to have their products and upgrades approved in a timely fashion, with direct consequences for their customers.

“I would say from the operator’s perspective, it’s been pretty acute in our circumstance,” said Michael Tosi, the CEO of HeliService USA, which operates a fleet of Leonardo AW169 helicopters. The AW169’s avionics and automatic flight control system are upgraded in phases, with each phase offering significant enhancements over previous versions. However, delays in FAA approval of phases already certified by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) forced HeliService USA to continue operating with older phases long after its European peers had access to the latest upgrades.

“Each phase is supposed to be an improvement, and an aviation improvement is generally inherently safety-related,” Tosi said, noting that upgrades after Phase 4 in particular addressed an undesirable response of the autopilot in turbulence. With respect to the FAA’s delays in approving new phases, he said, “it’s a very clear issue where in an effort to ‘be safe’ the FAA in fact made everything less safe.”

A mounting problem

One obvious target of blame for slower certification processes in the U.S. is the Boeing 737 Max. Two crashes of the airliner killed a combined 346 people in 2018 and 2019, leading to an extended grounding of the model while investigators worked to understand the root causes of the accidents. They ultimately identified serious problems with the design of a system specific to the 737 Max called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), as well as shortcomings in FAA oversight of Boeing, which allowed the flawed system to be certified.

In response to these revelations, the U.S. Congress passed the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act (ACSAA) in 2020. Among its many provisions, ACSAA required stricter FAA oversight of the certification of safety-critical systems on transport category airplanes and discouraged applicants from exerting pressure on certification personnel. Although the act was focused on large airliners specifically, the fallout from the 737 Max crisis prompted increased scrutiny throughout the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service (AIR).

However, many of the people who spoke with Vertical for this story indicated that the challenges in certifying new technology for rotorcraft pre-date the 737 Max crisis and stem primarily from shortages of experienced personnel. According to Matteo Raggazi, director of engineering for Leonardo, the FAA once had a wealth of certification specialists who were highly experienced and knowledgeable about helicopters.

“When somebody in the FAA said you’ve got a problem, 90 percent of times you did have a problem,” Raggazi recalled. “That was some years ago. The guys knew the business, knew their discipline, and they knew exactly what they were talking about, so the conversation was never bureaucratic. Then they started losing people … and rotorcraft didn’t seem to be a priority.”

Even outside of rotorcraft, the FAA has struggled to attract and retain enough qualified personnel. An expert panel convened at the direction of ACSAA found that “FAA staffing is being negatively impacted by the FAA’s inability to hire and retain qualified engineers, pilots, and inspectors,” according to a report published in 2022. Among other things, the panel concluded that “pay scales for FAA pilots and aerospace engineers have not kept pace with aerospace industry wages, resulting in the FAA having limited success in hiring experienced pilots and engineers.”

Robinson CEO David Smith agrees that personnel shortages are hampering the FAA’s ability to certify new products and upgrades in a timely fashion, with progress often contingent upon the availability of specific employees with the requisite authority or expertise for a particular task. “The real problem is there’s not enough of them. We haven’t built the system to recruit the best talent, the strongest players, into the regulatory world,” he told Vertical.

Smith said that Robinson has experienced impacts from FAA personnel shortages in recent certification programs, including its efforts to certify a new horizontal stabilizer design across its product line to reduce the risk of catastrophic mast bumping accidents.

“Scheduling flight test resources within the FAA is extremely challenging, and there’s just not enough folks,” Smith said. “That’s one area that we saw significant impact delays in scheduling by months because of the resourcing of those jobs.” He suggested that the entire industry should be lobbying Congress to add money to the FAA budget specifically for certification staff.

The FAA told Vertical via email that it is “actively hiring certification engineers, flight test staff, and other certification personnel to support staffing needs for current and future certification projects,” as detailed in its latest Aviation Safety Workforce Plan. The FAA said that the federal government’s recent workforce reduction and deferred resignation program did not apply to safety-critical positions, including certification personnel. Vertical understands, however, that the associated upheaval prompted a number of experienced employees to leave the FAA anyway, exacerbating the agency’s pre-existing workforce challenges.

Not learning by not doing

Even as the FAA has been losing experienced rotorcraft personnel, a paucity of clean-sheet helicopter type certification programs has limited the ability of new employees to build relevant experience on the job. Most of the new civil helicopter models introduced to the market over the past two decades have obtained their original certification from EASA or Transport Canada, with the FAA playing a secondary role in subsequently validating those type certificates.

“It’s not rocket science: the competence level goes with the number of exercises and endeavors that you need to follow — applicants, projects, and so on,” said Ragazzi. Yet the last clean-sheet, transport-category helicopter to obtain its original type certification from the FAA was the Sikorsky S-92 in 2002, nearly a quarter-century ago.

There is a widespread impression within industry that less experienced certification specialists naturally tend to take a more cautious or procedural approach to decision-making. Meanwhile, FAA managers may be less willing to overrule them than they would have been before the 737 Max crisis, out of concern for being seen as caving to OEM demands. This can lead to programs getting stalled over individual differences of opinions on specific aspects of a design.

In 2023, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) reported that 40 percent of engineers in AIR had less than three years of FAA certification experience, and that “improving overall agency experience is a real challenge which has been intensified due to the pandemic and post-pandemic changes in workforce trends.” When asked by Vertical for an updated figure, the FAA did not reply directly.

“While some of our engineers may not begin their careers at the FAA, many come to the agency with significant experience in industry and other highly technical backgrounds. This experience is invaluable in understanding how products are designed and built and directly strengthens our ability to oversee the system,” the agency said.

“Every FAA certification engineer undergoes rigorous training and works closely with our most seasoned experts. Their work is part of a safety system that relies on collaboration, peer review, and technical rigor — ensuring that oversight never depends on one individual’s years of service but on the strength of the entire process,” the FAA added.

While there are indications that EASA is also missing certification resources in some areas, the agency said it has generally benefited from having a pragmatic certification process that uses a risk-based approach and a more efficient rulemaking process than its counterpart across the pond. In addition to having more recent experience with clean-sheet helicopter certification programs than the FAA, the European regulator has stayed ahead of the curve in updating the relevant certification basis, as Airbus Helicopters pointed out.

“In recent years, EASA has regularly updated the Certification Specifications applicable to rotorcraft (six amendments in five years),” Airbus told Vertical by email. “This is creating a gap with the FAA certification basis, and may create difficulties in defining the certification basis of new projects and induce delays.”

Airbus said that the rotorcraft industry has initiated collaborative work with the two authorities to help bridge this gap and realign EASA and FAA certification requirements. “Authorities, in turn, have focused on reducing interpretational differences in existing rules, with already some positive impacts on ongoing validation projects,” the company said.

Enter eVTOLs

Not all delays in bringing new helicopters to market are related to the certification process itself. For example, Ragazzi said that the protracted development of the single-engine Leonardo AW09, which made its first flight in 2014 as the Marenco Swisshelicopter SKYe SH09, is mostly due to changes in the supplier base to ensure a competitive product. Notably, after acquiring the program from its original owner, Leonardo opted to replace the original Honeywell HTS900 turboshaft engine with the better-supported Arriel 2K from Safran.

“Imagine what it takes to integrate a completely different engine with respect to what was originally envisaged,” Ragazzi said. “We did run into certification issues, but nothing that could not be fixed.”

The newer the technology, however, the more likely it is to become bogged down in certification bureaucracy, in part because regulators must write a certification basis for the technology before proceeding to approve it. An extreme example of this is the years of effort the FAA and EASA have put into establishing certification bases for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, which have drawn away experienced personnel, including rotorcraft specialists, from other projects.

“The FAA allocates its certification resources in a balanced manner to address both new entrants, such as eVTOL developers, and existing general aviation OEMs,” the agency told Vertical. “We aim to ensure that both sectors receive the necessary support and expertise to advance their certification projects while maintaining our rigorous safety standards.”

Ragazzi said it is objectively true that eVTOLs have siphoned certification resources away from helicopter programs in the U.S. and Europe. “On the other hand,” he said, “the simple fact that there are new players, new solutions, new architectures and so on, I hope that in the long run is actually making these two authorities more used to the idea of the new solutions.”

The FAA and U.S. Department of Transportation are now working to expedite the commercialization of eVTOLs through the recently launched eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), which will permit some limited, non-passenger-carrying operations of eVTOLs in the national airspace system (NAS) in advance of type certification and may be expanded to other emerging technologies. Speaking at the National Air Traffic Controllers Association’s annual safety conference in September 2025, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford explained that the program aims to help build real-world evidence to supplement the agency’s traditional certification processes for these complex new vehicles.

“If FAA were to go through its normal certification of advanced air mobility vehicles, and there’s dozens of them out there, we’d be here another 10 years before we actually certified one,” Bedford said, describing the fluid dynamics and engineering behind eVTOLs as “almost incomprehensible.” By putting them into service “not with people on board, but certainly operating in the NAS,” he said, “we can actually see how the devices themselves work, and start looking at the data that we can get that will help us make a decision on are they safe to certify.”

The case for innovation

Despite a challenging certification landscape, helicopter makers have not stopped innovating. Over the past decade, OEMs have pumped out a steady stream of product enhancements and upgrades, even if completely new types such as the Airbus H160 have been relatively few and far between.

This bias towards incremental improvements is a predictable consequence of an environment that discourages bold bets on new technology. Whatever business leaders might personally think about the optimal direction for innovation, they know that the smart money is on established technologies that have a better chance of making it over the certification finish line.

Executives must also make pragmatic decisions about how to balance their investments between speculative new products and existing product lines, especially if they see the former getting stuck in certification. Leonardo and Bell have many revenue-generating products beyond the AW609 and Bell 525, and neither can afford to throw all of their resources behind a new aircraft type with an unproven business case.

According to Airbus, the successful certification of the H160 — which is not fly-by-wire but does have many advanced features — proves that breakthrough technologies are still reaching the market. Even so, the company said it would like to see a modernized certification framework to improve safety and encourage innovation. It proposed three core principles for modernization, including performance-based regulation that offers flexibility for new technologies; enhanced and early collaboration between OEMs and regulators from the conceptual stage of new technologies to co-develop the certification basis; and a fully implemented risk-based oversight model.

The last principle, said Airbus, “will allow regulatory agencies to efficiently allocate their limited expert resources, focusing on the most critical, complex, and novel aspects of new designs. This means giving more privileges to major OEMs for topics where they have accumulated strong experience and shown a high level of performance.”

HeliService USA’s Tosi pointed out that it’s in the best interest of everyone in the industry to see new technologies and aircraft designs approved in a timely fashion, even those operators who aren’t necessarily in the market for a civil tiltrotor or fly-by-wire super medium helicopter. When high-end operators adopt the latest models, their newer used aircraft become available for other operators, prompting a reshuffling of the global fleet that tends to push out the oldest models at the low end. Initial certification also paves the way for wider adoption of new technologies such as fly-by-wire flight controls in future aircraft.

“Maybe for us I don’t need a 525, or maybe I do. But presumably, if that gets approved, that technology can roll downhill,” Tosi said. “Not only are our existing aircraft not upgraded as quickly and are not necessarily as safe as they could be, but also new aircraft aren’t being certified with revolutionary technologies that make stuff safer as well.”