Finmeccanica – AgustaWestland has announced that the company’s Philadelphia assembly line has built and delivered its 200th AW139 helicopter, featuring a firefighting configuration, for delivery to Mitsui Bussan Aerospace and the City of Yokohama.
The AW139, an industry standard for offshore transport duties supporting the oil and gas industry in addition to a wide spectrum of missions including search and rescue, homeland security, military transport, utility, and VIP/passenger transport, has been assembled in Philadelphia since December 2006, with production at the site progressing towards nearly 40 deliveries per year.
The AW139 complies with the latest certification and safety standards, offering outstanding overall performance with impressive power margin and one engine inoperative capability for added safety, as well as the largest cabin in its class. The modern design of the aircraft ensures ease of maintenance and high availability due to reduced numbers of components, easy access to all main systems by ground technicians, extended life-cycles for critical components and advanced diagnostics technology.
Orders for nearly 800 AW139s have been placed by more than 210 customers in over 70 nations to date. Nearly 700 units are already in service carrying out a wide variety of missions such as VIP/corporate and passenger transport, offshore transport, SAR/EMS, law enforcement, firefighting, government roles. The global fleet has recently set an outstanding milestone achieving 1 million flight hours in service worldwide.
The wide range of capabilities of the AW139 have made it extremely successful in Japan, with aircraft in service with the Japan Coast Guard, Japan National Police Agency, Tokyo Metropolitan Police and Fire and Disaster Management Agency, as well as several prefectures and city agencies.
