Fred George

Chief Aircraft Evaluation Editor

Redmond, Oregon

Summary

Fred formerly served as senior editor and chief pilot with Business & Commercial Aviation and as Aviation Week & Space Technology's chief aircraft evaluation pilot. He has flown left seat in virtually every turbine-powered business jet produced in the past three decades. He now is managing member of Fred George Aero LLC of Redmond, Oregon.

He has flown more than 195 makes, models and variants, ranging from the Piper J-3 Cub through the latest Boeing and Airbus large twins, logging more than 7,000 hours of flight time. He has earned an Airline Transport Pilot certificate and six jet aircraft type ratings, and he remains an active pilot. Fred also specializes in avionics, aircraft systems and pilot technique reports.

Fred was the first aviation journalist to fly the Boeing 787, Airbus A350 and Gulfstream G650, among other new turbofan aircraft. He’s also flown the Airbus A400M, Howard 500, Airship 600, Dassault Rafale, Grumman HU-16 Albatross and Lockheed Constellation.

Prior to joining Aviation Week, he was an FAA designated pilot examiner [CE-500], instrument flight instructor and jet charter pilot and former U.S. Naval Aviator who made three cruises to the western Pacific while flying the McDonnell-Douglas F-4J Phantom II.

Fred has won numerous aviation journalism awards, including NBAA’s David W. Ewald Platinum Wing Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Articles

By Fred George [email protected]
Strap into the left seat of a Global Express XRS equipped with Bombardier’s new Global Vision cockpit and you’ll see four, 15.1-inch flat-panel displays, the largest screens installed in any new business jet. You’ll also see sharper imagery from a new generation of video systems, including a synthetic vision system that uses the highest resolution terrain database that is commercially available and an IR EVS camera with four times the sensor resolution found on current generation Bombardier aircraft.

Fred George
Beechcraft veteran Randy Groom was chosen last week by Piper Aircraft CEO and President Kevin Gould to be the manufacturer’s new executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer support, effective June 1. Piper began an extensive search to fill the opening in its senior leadership team when Robert Kromer, former VP sales and marketing, left the organization in late 2009. Groom will concentrate on boosting sales and enhancing customer satisfaction, among other tasks, capitalizing on his three-plus decades of experience in general aviation.

Fred George
Advance the thrust levers of the Hawker 900XP and you’d be hard pressed to recognize it as the 19th iteration of the venerable DH-125, first produced in 1964 by Britain's Hawker Siddeley. With the 900XP, fill the tanks and the seats and depart from a 5,000-foot runway. No other midsize aircraft has such range/payload flexibility. At MTOW, it will climb directly to FL 410 in 25 minutes, fly eight passengers more than 2,700 nm and land with NBAA IFR reserves.