Born from the Loach

MD Helicopters is the latest name on a family tree that runs back to Howard Hughes. His helicopter men designed the Model 369, the egg-shaped OH-6 Cayuse that won the US Army’s light observation contest in 1965, and its civilian twin, the Hughes 500, on sale from 1967. When Summa Corporation sold Hughes Helicopters to McDonnell Douglas in January 1984 for $470 million, it became McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Systems at Mesa, Arizona, the plant where the Apache was built. One odd episode from the 1980s still haunts the 500: North Korea used a West German export firm to buy 87 civilian MD 500s, and paraded armed versions in Pyongyang in 2013.

No tail rotor

Under McDonnell Douglas the company chased a quieter helicopter. Its NOTAR system replaced the tail rotor with a fan blowing air through slots in the tail boom, using the Coandă effect to counter torque. The MD 530N first flew on 29 December 1989 and the MD 520N on 1 May 1990, certified in 1991. Then came a clean-sheet design, the twin-engined MD Explorer, built with composite airframes from Hawker de Havilland in Australia. It first flew on 18 December 1992 and won FAA approval two years later. A stretched single, the MD 600N, followed in 1995. With no tail rotor to strike, police and medical operators liked the safety case.

Orphaned by a merger

The big merger of 1997 left the helicopters orphaned. Boeing kept the Apache and the Little Bird special-forces helicopters, and tried to sell the civil line to Bell, a deal the US Federal Trade Commission blocked. In early 1999 Boeing spun it off instead to MD Helicopter Holdings, an indirect subsidiary of the Dutch group RDM, while keeping the rights to NOTAR. Sales were poor. In 2005 the investment fund Patriarch Partners bought the company and Lynn Tilton, Patriarch’s founder, took over as chief executive, a role she kept until March 2020.

Afghanistan and the courts

Military sales kept the factory alive. Armed MD 530F Cayuse Warriors went to Afghanistan under a $1.4 billion US government contract placed in 2017; the Afghan Air Force received its 30th aircraft of the first order in October 2019, flown from Mesa to Kandahar and operational within ten days, and had 60 in all from that contract. Kenya ordered them too. But Tilton’s wider business empire was tied up in court battles, and in March 2022 MD Helicopters filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A creditor group led by Bardin Hill and MBIA took over and the company emerged in August 2022.

Back from bankruptcy

The new management inherited a famous name and a thin order book. In 2022 the company delivered just four helicopters. Chief executive Brad Pedersen set out to fix spares and support for a worldwide fleet of about 1,700 MD aircraft first, recruited 130 workers, and set a target of 50 deliveries a year by 2025, split between military and civil buyers. The MD 902 Explorer line, dormant for close to a decade, was not restarted. In 2023 MD settled a long copyright fight with Aerometals and grew closer to Boeing on the Little Bird, whose airframe is a cousin of the MD 530F.

Fábricas

• Planta Mesa · Mesa, Arizona — Headquarters and assembly; can handle up to about 50 aircraft a year

Gente

• Lynn Tilton · CEO, 2005–2020 — Founder of Patriarch Partners, which bought the company in 2005
• Brad Pedersen · President and CEO from 2022 — Led the post-bankruptcy recovery

Récords y primicias

• First production helicopters with the NOTAR no-tail-rotor system, MD 520N certified 13 September 1991