Bell Helicopter is attempting to reinvent the JetRanger and reenter a market it left behind five years ago. Juggling development of the Bell 525 super-medium and V-280 Valor, the company's tiltrotor candidate for the US. Army's Future Vertical Lift requirement, Bell has added the Short Light Single (SLS), revealed at the Paris air show here, in a bid to regain market share lost to types such as the Robinson R66 and Eurocopter EC120 that have leaped into the gap created when JetRanger production ended 2.5 years ago. Perhaps most significantly, the helicopter-scheduled to make its first flight in 2014-will be the first Bell product to use a Turbomeca engine, adopting a new version of the Ar-rius series of lightweight turboshafts, called Arrius 2R, also launched here last week. The engine is a 450-550-shp version of the EC120's powerplant.
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