Kawasaki advised the XOH-1 (OH-X), nicknamed Ninja, Japan's newbattlefield advance helicopter. One JDA activity to which the aircraft industry's fortunes are angry is the OH-X ascertainment helicopter, the aboriginal such aircraft, including engine, to be developed in Japan. KHI is the airframe prime contractor, just as it is on the McDonnell Douglas-licensed OH-6D, which the OH-X will replace. MHI is in allegation of the new helicopter's accompanying engines. The aboriginal XOH-1 ancestor fabricated its aboriginal flight on 6 Aug, 1996. A absolute of four delivered amid May and August 1997. The Ground Self-Defense Force has penciled in purchases of 180 to 200 OH-Xs. That would be far beneath than the 297 OH-6Ds KHI had through March 1995, and even this ambition could abatement casualty to the new aegis account realities in Japan.
Like agnate types, OH-1 has bike basement and butt wings for armament. The ducted appendage rotor is of "fenestron" type. The architecture appearance a blended hinge-less rotor hub for top ascendancy albatross with accident advanced capital rotor blades, and auto Flight Ascendancy System. The targeting arrangement is integrated, with FLIR, TV and LASER alignment system. The shock arresting bench and aggregation aegis armor are allotment of the chip cockpit.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. had been developing an all-composite bearingless helicopter capital rotor arrangement for over fifteen years. Series accumulation began for the new ablaze ascertainment helicopter, the OH-1. The bearing-less rotor arrangement consists of a hub plate, bewilderment elements and the capital rotor blades. These apparatus are actual circuitous blended parts, acute an avant-garde automatic lay-up and abstraction process. To facilitate this charge KHI developed a automatic ambulant adjustment arrangement and a new abstraction action alleged Matched-die Isostatic Pressing, MIP.
