This paper gives an overview about typical reasons for significant weight increases of rotorcraft programs during development and during the entire product life cycle. It demonstrates how industrial constraints, conflicts between business functions and changes in the legal environment lead to technical decisions increasing the product's weight and/or degrading the CoG balance. Furthermore this paper explains customer aspects in making decisions to choose between more and less weight optimized solutions. As weight saving campaigns are typically launched late in the program's lifecycle, this paper gives a generic methodology to manage them successfully considering both weight and cost. While optimizing the weight, mission flexibility is often degraded. This paper demonstrates ways to find the best compromise solution.
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