BY JOANNA DODDER NELLANS W


hen Bell wanted to compete directly with Robinson Helicopter Company,


leadership assigned David Smith to be chief engineer for the development of the Bell 505. The first thing Smith did was lease a Robinson R66 for his team to analyze.


“I told them, ‘You need to know the enemy,’” Smith recalled. Bell’s old guard had mocked the Robinson helicopter as a “toy for the rich guys,” but Smith’s team quickly realized it was much, much more.


“When we took it apart and studied it, it was quite the opposite,” Smith related. “It was ruthlessly efficient. As an engineer, I could appreciate the thousands and thousands of decisions they made that got the product to this highly evolved state.”


The 505 Jet Ranger X project was completed early and $10 million under budget under Smith’s leadership. Now a decade later, Smith is Robinson’s new leader after serving as its VP of operations for the past year.


Smith has big shoes to fill as the company’s first president/CEO whose last name is not Robinson, since the late Frank Robinson and then his son Kurt ran the company for the first half- century of its existence. However, Smith has plenty of pedigree of his own with an aerospace engineering degree from MIT and more than 20 years of experience in aviation and rotorcraft. He spent most of his career at Bell Flight in multiple leadership roles across engineering, serving as program director for critical product developments as well as the vice president of operations modernization. Smith also led TRU Simulation + Training Inc., an affiliate of Textron Aviation, delivering pilot training solutions that include full-flight simulators and flight training devices.


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