Airbus Helicopters

Airbus Helicopters is the rotorcraft division of Airbus SE. It was assembled in 1992 from the helicopter businesses of France's Aerospatiale and Germany's DASA, traded as Eurocopter for two decades, and took the Airbus name on 2 January 2014. The head office sits beside Marseille Provence Airport at Marignane, and roughly 23,000 people work across a network of about 32 subsidiaries, among them Helibras in Brazil and Airbus Helicopters, Inc. in the United States. Volume matters here. The division is the largest supplier of light and medium civil rotorcraft in the world, and that civil production base is what underwrites the military line rather than the reverse.

The civil range runs from the single-engine H125 up through the H135, H145, H160 and H175 to the heavier H215 and H225 Super Puma twins. Those airframes fly emergency medical missions, offshore crew shuttles, police patrols, firefighting sorties and utility lift. Corporate customers buy the same aircraft in cabin-configured form under the Airbus Corporate Helicopters brand, and the division also brokers pre-owned airframes returning off lease or out of operator fleets.

Military variants carry an M suffix and are sold with mission equipment rather than as bare airframes. The H125M Fennec, H145M, H160M, H175M, H215M Cougar and H225M cover armed scout, special forces insertion, combat search and rescue and tactical transport roles, while the HForce weapon system lets a customer add guns, rockets and guided munitions to a light airframe without paying for a bespoke development programme. Two collaborative types anchor the heavier end. The Tiger attack helicopter flies with France, Germany and Spain, and the NH90 tactical transport is built through the NHIndustries consortium. In the United States the UH-72 Lakota, a derivative of the H145, serves the Army and the National Guard, and a militarised H135 is used as a training platform. Uncrewed work is expanding, led by the VSR700, a 700 kg rotary-wing UAV derived from the Cabri G2 that the French Navy contracted for shipborne surveillance and anti-submarine tasks, with a supporting line of small vertical-takeoff tactical drones and the HTeaming capability that links crewed helicopters to them.

Aftermarket work is sold under the HCare label, organised around material management, maintenance, technical support, training and flight operations, and connected services, then packaged by operator type as HCare Initial, In-service, Lifetime, First and Classics. Research runs alongside the production lines. The RACER compound demonstrator, a descendant of the earlier X3, first flew at Marignane on 25 April 2024 and had reached 240 knots in cruise by the middle of 2025, work pointed squarely at the next generation of fast rotorcraft. Marignane remains the hub of the French-origin line, and deployed customers are handled through a network of military support centres placed near operating bases so that readiness work happens locally rather than being shipped back to France.