Thunder City offers Puma upgrade

Thunder City, a Cape Town based company best known for its fleet of vintage jet fighters, used Africa Aerospace and Defence 2008 as the venue to enter the helicopter upgrade market. Company CEO Emilio Titus said that the company was putting the engineering skills learnt on maintaining vintage aircraft, such as Lightnings and Hawker Hunters, in to offering modernisation of Puma medium-lift helicopters. The company has already completely rebuilt a Puma helicopter, including the installation of a new glass cockpit supplied by Cobham, and says it will now be offering the service to Puma operators worldwide. Titus said that there had been a lot of initial interest at the show, where the helicopter is on display, for the service. There are currently some 600 Puma helicopters flying around the world with considerable fleets in Africa. South Africa is one of the countries believed to be interested in the concept of updating its aircraft. Titus said that what the company was offering was a full rebuild including P4 service and parts replacement that would take between nine and twelve months. On top of the airframe refurbishment Thunder City have also sourced a full avionics upgrade from Cobham, which includes the latter’s Synthetic Visualisation System (SVS). Gordon Pratt, Cobham Avionics & Surveillance Vice President, Business Development told Rotorhub.com that the new avionics gave the aircraft even more capability than the new build Super Pumas currently coming off of Eurocopter’s production line. The SVS gives the pilot a real-time visual representation of the terrain outside the cockpit including towers, antenna and other obstructions as well as other aircraft. Thunder City’s upgrade has been certified by the South African Civil Aviation Authority and Titus said the company was also in discussions with Eurocopter to get the upgrade certified by the manufacturer. He said that there was some interest from Eurocopter about the upgrade as the company begins to wind down its own support of the aircraft. Thunder City hopes that its suggested upgrade will be a cost effective solution for Puma operators. The company has already sourced three Puma aircraft to update and said that it would also be willing to source other aircraft for those wanting to purchase the updated Puma who don’t currently operate their own fleet.