The SAAF Forum

hi guys, what happened to the single-engined turbine trainer, al a pc7 kinda lookalike that denel/armscor/atlas built in the early 90's? did that airplane ever get off the ground?
jacques

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I Fly to release my mind from the tyranny of petty things! Antoine

It was called the All Composite Evaluator (ACE) and yes the prototype did fly until it made a belly landing(If I remember correctly?) at JIA. It has not flown since and the project has probably been shelved, although there where plans to build the improved ACE II.

Yep, it was a project by Aerotek, which at the time was the aeronautical development arm of the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research). That sort of work falls under Defencetek at the CSIR now, I think.

Well, in short Aerotek realised that the SAAF would soon be announcing a contract to replace the Harvard, and also realised that they'd reached a sort of critical mass in their capabilities with composites, so they decided to partner with Atlas (now Denel Aviation) to create a composite aircraft to fulfill the SAAF's requirement.

So they created the Ovid, which held the distinction of being the world's first all-composite trainer, being made from a carbon/glass honeycomb structure.
By all accounts it was a lovely aircraft, being fully aerobatic, with excellent flying characteristics, excellent visibility and ergonomics and a very low parts count. Impressively, Atlas was prepared to underwrite a 20 000hr fatigue life.

The Ovid first flew on the 29th of April 1991, as an XDM aircraft and flew 180 hours over 15 months before going back to Atlas for some modification and emerging as an ADM aircraft, which is how it kept flying till the end of 2003, including some minor mods in between.

Unfortunately, the Ovid was just too late to scoop the SAAF initial trainer contract, due to two things. One, it would have taken too long to bring it into production for the SAAF's requirements, and two, the changing political climate made it possible for the SAAF to buy from Pilatus in Switzerland.

So, having lost the SAAF contract, Atlas and Aerotek decided all was not lost, the lifting of the arms embargos meant export orders might be in the offing, so they renamed the aircraft the ACE, or All-Composite Evaluator, and it went to a couple of foreign airshows, where there was a decent amount of interest, but no sales were ever forthcoming.

I seem to remember after that, that Atlas and Aerotek modified the aircraft some more, fitting a glass cockpit, a dive-brake and a new tailplane, and that might have been the ACE II, but I'm not too sure about that.

Then, as Paul said, the aircraft had the landing incident and the entire project was shelved, as apparently the aircraft suffered rather severe damage. So although the aircraft is still on the SA register (ZU-AHE), it has not flown in years, and the ACE project has been abandoned.

Cheers

Darren

Hi Darren,

I am again stunned by your knowledge, it always is an interesting read when you post something...

Are there any pictures available of the project?

Stephan

No problem, and thank you, but of course in this case credit must go to the AirReport team, as I got most of this info out of AirReport 1994, which also has some very nice pictures of the ACE.

Unfortunately, I've had no luck trying to locate online images of it, or in fact anything online at all aside from a one-line mention on the CSIR website.

Cheers,

Darren

Hi Darren,

thanks a lot. I did some search and this is what I found:
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/eng/views/columnist/onlife/?show=8288 contains some PC-7 vs. Ovid information.

http://www.tecentre.co.za/teccatalo1.2.pdf also contains a picture on page 8, I think it was a rather good-looking plane.

Wow, good links, thanks, I especially liked browsing that pdf file, which had quite a few interesting things, despite parts of it dating back to 1998 or so.
That's not a bad pic of the Ovic, but Atlas really made it look so much nicer when converting it to the ACE, with a better paintscheme. The AirReport photos were taken by Herman Potgieter, so they're excellent, and yes, it actually was quite a nice-looking aircraft. As I said, a pity it was not possible for it to have entered service instead of the Astra, though the Astra is also very nice.

The Engineering News column goes into quite a bit more detail than I knew about, though I got it partially right in saying it would have taken too long to bring it into service the way the SAAF wanted it.
I didn't know about those three key risk areas though, though I suppose that is one of the hazards of marketing aircraft using relatively new and untested materials.

I do however think the article is hamming it up more than a little bit, as the ACE could probably have entered production by 1996, or 1997 at the latest, in other words only one or two years later than the Astra (which started arriving in Oct. 1994). To have compared it to the Rooivalk was wrong, in my opinion, as the Rooivalk was a vastly more complex project, and therefore required more prototype and development aircraft than the ACE would have. Also, the ACE would have needed a simpler production process than the Rooivalk or perhaps even the Astra, due to the simplicity and low parts count of its composite structure. So I think they were a bit unfair to the Ovid, and it's chances, for instance saying "It was not even at stage one" is quite a bit of an exaggeration. I suppose they may have been hamming it up for a reason, to silence the critics with a heavy broadside, but it's not fair in my opinion to the project. The Ovid was essentially a story of an aircraft in the right place at the wrong time, it matured two years too late.

So, it's a pity the ACE never entered SAAF service, but the extra time required and the additional risk to select it made the Astra the logical choice for the SAAF, and besides, the Astra is an excellent aircraft, so the SAAF lost nothing in terms of capability. The cost of spares is a downside, but it's not really a major issue, being one only of cost and not one of capability or safety. Interestingly, Pilatus refers to it as the PC-7 MkII M, whereas in SAAF service the M is dropped. That might however just be a new Pilatus naming strategy.


Cheers,

Darren