Whilst the helicopter is always limited to operations within its flight manual limitations, and may be cleared for ships, each unique ship/helicopter combination needs to be explored in an appropriate manner. The helicopter-ship qualification testing consists initially of shore-based hover trials to document the low speed flight characteristics, as a function of referred weight and relative wind condition, and these data will be combined with airwake data for each ship type to develop the so-called "candidate flight envelope". This candidate flight envelope will be (partially) validated during sea trials for each ship type. This paper describes how a predictive engineering tool, so-called "SHOL-X", is applied for the NH90 NFH helicopter-ship qualification testing for the landing platform dock "Hr.Ms. Rotterdam". By using the predictive tool, the helicopter-ship qualification testing is less dependent on the results from several dedicated sea trials. The predictive tool thereby not only reduces time and costs of the test campaigns across the fleet, but also improves the reliability of the finally determined operational envelopes used for in-service operations for many years to come.
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