We describe the flight-testing of a suite of H_∞ controllers designed using linearisations extracted from a new nonlinear model of the Bell 205 helicopter. Details of the design, simulation and flight-test results are discussed in the paper, and we give qualitative and quantative handling qualities information, evaluated against the ADS-33 standard. The most noteable achievements of the work were, (1) stability was acheived for all controllers tested and, moreover, some of them yielded desirable handling qualities from the first test onwards, and (2) a high degree of consistency between desk-top simulation and flight-test results was observed. Achieved performance was generally satisfactory and future planned flight tests will build on these results with the aim to increase performance further.