Two minutes on the roof of the world

On 14 May 2005 test pilot Didier Delsalle set a single-engine AS350 B3 down on the summit of Mount Everest, 8,848 metres above the sea, and held it there for about two minutes. To give the machine a fighting chance in air that thin he had stripped out around 120 kg of equipment, buying an extra hour of fuel. It was the first time a helicopter had landed on the top of the world. The remarkable part is how unremarkable the helicopter was: the same everyday Squirrel of which more than 7,200 have been built for police forces, air ambulances and utility operators. That, in a single landing, is Airbus Helicopters — a company whose bread-and-butter products keep doing extraordinary things.

A French turbine, a world record that still stands

The Airbus name on the tail is only a few years old, but the bloodline is long. The French side descends from Sud Aviation and Aérospatiale, whose Alouette II first flew in March 1955 and became the world’s first production turbine-powered helicopter. Three months later Jean Boulet took one to a record 8,209 metres. In 1972 he went further, taking an Aérospatiale Lama to 12,442 metres — a helicopter altitude record that still stands. At the top the engine flamed out, and Boulet glided all the way down in the longest autorotation ever recorded. The German side came from the helicopter business of Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm, by then part of Daimler-Benz Aerospace.

From Eurocopter to Airbus

On 16 January 1992 the two rivals merged their helicopter divisions into Eurocopter. Aérospatiale, then holding about a third of the world market, took 70 per cent; DASA, with about 8 per cent of the market, took 30. When the parents merged in 2000 to form what became Airbus, Eurocopter became a wholly owned subsidiary. On 2 January 2014 it took the group’s name, and in 2015 the old EC designations gave way to simple H-numbers. The man in charge through that change was Guillaume Faury, a helicopter flight-test engineer and former chief engineer of the EC225, who ran the company from 2013 to 2018 — and then went on to run all of Airbus from April 2019. Bruno Even has led the helicopter business since 2018.

The workhorses

The money is made by the workhorses. The H125, descended from the AS350 that first flew at Marignane in June 1974, is the backbone of utility flying. The H135, first flown in February 1994, became an air-ambulance favourite: by 2016 about half the fleet was flying emergency medical missions. The H145 family, which grew out of the MBB/Kawasaki BK 117, passed 1,600 built in 2023, and the US Army bought hundreds as the UH-72 Lakota, assembled at Columbus, Mississippi. In 2025 the H145 was again the bestseller, with 149 orders, and Airbus claimed 51 per cent of the civil and parapublic market.

Tigers and NH90s: the hard sell

Military helicopters have been a rougher ride. The Tiger attack helicopter, first flown in April 1991, was the first all-composite helicopter developed in Europe, yet Australia decided in 2021 to replace its Tigers with American Apaches and withdrew the last of them in September 2026. The NH90, built under the NHIndustries banner, was the first production helicopter with entirely fly-by-wire controls — and Norway cancelled its fleet in 2022 demanding a full refund, while Australia grounded its own in 2023. Even so, more than 525 have been built, and in 2025 Spain ordered 100 Airbus helicopters in a single package.

A dark afternoon off Bergen

The worst day in the company’s history came on 29 April 2016. An H225 Super Puma operated by CHC Helikopter Service was carrying two crew and 11 passengers off the coast near Bergen when, close to the island of Turøy, its main rotor tore away at about 2,000 feet. All 13 people on board were killed. Norwegian investigators traced the cause to a fatigue fracture in a second-stage planet gear deep inside the main gearbox. The H225 and its AS332 L2 cousin were grounded; in the United States the flight ban was not formally lifted until 2021, after mandatory modifications. Coming after two gearbox-related ditchings in the North Sea in 2012, the crash badly damaged the type’s standing in the offshore market.

Faster than a helicopter should go

The company has also spent two decades trying to make helicopters go faster than helicopters should. The X3, a compound with a conventional rotor and two propellers on short wings, first flew in September 2010 and on 7 June 2013 reached 255 knots, 472 km/h, in level flight — an unofficial speed record. Its successor, the Racer demonstrator, first flew at Marignane on 25 April 2024 and reached a cruise speed of 440 km/h in 2025. Meanwhile the business keeps growing: 544 gross orders and 392 deliveries in 2025, customers in 50 countries that year, and a military market share Airbus put at 28 per cent.

Fábricas

• Marignano · Marseille Provence Airport, Bouches-du-Rhône, France — Headquarters and main plant, about 6,600 direct employees
• La Courneuve / Dugny · Paris region, France — La Courneuve site dating from 1917; moved to a new 60,000 square metre plant at Dugny near Le Bourget in 2014
• Donauwörth · Bavaria, Germany — Main German plant
• Kassel · Hesse, Germany — Main plant
• Columbus · Mississippi, USA — UH-72 Lakota production
• Brașov · Romania — H215 final assembly since 2015
• Helibras · Itajubá, Brazil — Brazilian subsidiary
• Grand Prairie · Texas, USA — US subsidiary
• Airbus Helicopters Technik · Germany — Former ZF Luftfahrttechnik gearbox maker, acquired December 2022
• H125 final assembly line · India — Launched 2025

Pessoas

• Didier Delsalle · test pilot — Landed an AS350 B3 on the summit of Everest, 14 May 2005
• Jean Boulet · test pilot (Aérospatiale) — Set the Alouette II altitude record in 1955 and the still-standing 12,442 m Lama record in 1972
• Lutz Bertling · chief executive until 2013 — Succeeded by Guillaume Faury
• Guillaume Faury · chief executive 2013–2018 — Former EC225 chief engineer; Airbus chief executive from April 2019
• Bruno Even · chief executive since 2018
• Julien Guitton · head of the Racer programme

Recordes e pioneirismos

• First helicopter landing on the summit of Mount Everest, AS350 B3, 14 May 2005
• Unofficial helicopter speed record of 472 km/h (255 kt) in level flight, X3, 7 June 2013
• Heritage: helicopter altitude record of 12,442 m, Lama, 21 June 1972, still standing, with the longest recorded autorotation
• Heritage: world’s first production turbine-powered helicopter, Alouette II, 1955
• Heritage: first helicopter mountain rescue, Alouette II, above 4,000 m, 3 July 1956
• First production helicopter with entirely fly-by-wire flight controls, NH90
• First all-composite helicopter developed in Europe, Tiger
• First helicopter with electrical instead of hydraulic landing gear and brakes, H160
• First helicopter certified for flight in icing conditions, AS332 Super Puma, 1984