As a result, the US Army’s LOH competition was reopened in 1967 and, on 8 March 1968, Bell’s Model 206A “as announced as the winner, with pro-duction under the designation OH-58 Kiowa starting without delay some 2,200 of these aircraft were delivered by the end of 1973. The US Army had expected to procure some 4,000 examples of the OH-6A, but became somewhat disenchanted with Hughes when the unit cost began to climb rather steeply, and the production rate to fall off. It has been built in large numbers since 1966, and continues in production in 1989 in Canada under the designation Model 206B JetRanger III, having been the subject of progressive development and improvement programmes. The JetRanger was fundamentally the same as the OH-4A (formerly HO-4) prototypes, except for fuselage modifications to provide seating for five.
This flew for the first time on 10 January 1966, and on 20 October 1966 this aircraft received FAA certification, after which it entered production for commercial customers, being built also by Agusta in Italy. From the tests which followed, the Hughes HO-6 (later OH-6A) was selected for production as the US Army’s LOH.Īfter losing the competition the company built a new prototype which it designated as the Model 206A JetRanger. Design proposals were put forward by 12 US helicopter manufacturers from whom Bell, HilIer and Hughes were each contracted to build five prototypes for competitive evaluation. The specification called for four seats, a 181-kg (400-Ib) payload and cruising speed of around 193 km/h (120mph). In 1960 the US Army launched a design competition for a new aircraft which it certified as a Light Observation Helicopter (LOH).
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