Airbus Helicopters in America: The Pioneering Years

The roots of Airbus Helicopters in North America can be traced back to 1955 when the US Army announced it was purchasing three Djinn helicopters for evaluation at Fort Rucker, Alabama. In the pioneering years, Airbus Helicopters - originally known as Sud Aviation (later Aerospatiale) and Bolkow (later Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm) - worked through at least six different sales agents to break into the United States and Canadian market before they established their own subsidiaries in the 1970s in which merged in 1992 when Eurocopter was formed to combine the helicopter divisions of Aérospatiale and DASA (Deutsche Aerospace Aktiengesellschaft) located in France and Germany. Today, Airbus Helicopters accounts for a substantial share of new helicopter sales in the United States and Canada, but in the pioneering years it faced an uphill battle against a thriving American helicopter industry and strong "buy America" sentiment, such that the pioneering efforts by the European helicopter to gain a foothold in North America have been largely forgotten. This paper covers the period from the mid-1950s to 1969 when small number of Sud Aviation Djinn and Alouette II and III helicopters were operated in North America - with the majority migrating to Canada by the late 1960s.