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

Fred George
The arrival of the Beech King Air 200 in 1974 sent shock waves throughout the turboprop industry, especially at Piper Aircraft where the Cheyenne II, a direct competitor for the Beech E90, had just made its debut. If Piper wanted to compete, it quickly would have to develop a much larger and more powerful model. Piper launched a clean-sheet turboprop development program that would become the PA-42 Cheyenne III in 1979.

Fred George
Dassault elected to fit the Falcon 7X with one of the most redundant fly-by-wire (FBW) systems ever installed in a civil jet. It's highly fault-tolerant so its master minimum equipment list will be long and complete. Dispatch will be permitted with multiple single components faults, including failure of one channel of each side-stick controller, one SmartProbe inoperative and loss of a single flight data concentrator, one channel in a main flight control computer (MFCC) or in an actuator control monitoring unit.

Fred George
More than 85 Boeing Business Jets (BBJ) have entered service, since initial green deliveries began in November 1998. BBJs are flown by operators based in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Middle East. The fleet has accumulated in excess of 175,000 flight hours with a dispatch reliability of better than 99.9 percent.