What's it like to fly an Airbus? Accompanied by William Wainwright, chief test pilot at Airbus Industries' Toulouse facility, I strapped into the left seat of its A320-001 veteran flight test aircraft, the 22-feet longer and older sibling of the A319. Airbus Industrie intends to tank and trim the A319 to transform it into a corporate jetliner (CJ) capable of flying 10 passengers up to 6,300 nm.
FAA has approved a performance envelope expansion for the Boeing MD 600N that will enable operators to increase the weight and altitude at which takeoff and landing operations will be permitted.
PS Air of Cedar Rapids, Iowa was appointed a factory sales and service center for Sino Swearingen's SJ30-2 business jet expected to receive certification in late 1999
Beginning in the second quarter of 1999, Galaxy Aerospace will introduce an optional CD-ROM version of the maintenance manuals for its IAI 1125 and 1126 business jets. The program, being developed by Jana, Inc. of San Antonio, will have an annual subscription price of $3,000, including revisions, for Astras, and $4,000 for Galaxies. Hard copies of the manuals cost $7,300, plus $1,500 annually for updates.
SkyWest will replace Delta service effective October 1 at Fresno, Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Jackson Hole, Wyo. This will enable Delta to use its assets to increase service from Salt Lake City to Boston and Washington's Dulles Airport.
VisionAire of Chesterfield, Mo. selected Nuremberg, Germany's Aero-Dienst to be a service center for European operations of the Vantage jet scheduled to receive certification in late 1999
Aircraft Technical Publishers, a Brisbane, Calif. provider of maintenance and regulatory libraries on CDs and microfiche, has released a CD library for 19 models and their derivatives of Textron Lycoming engine service letters and instructions
The Citation Ground Handling and Servicing Manual is a comprehensive reference from Cessna designed to familiarize line service and maintenance personnel with the care and feeding of all Citation models. Tabs separating information for the various aircraft models simplify navigation through the document. The three-and-one-half-inch thick publication includes sections on towing, taxiing, parking, fuel servicing, external cleaning, toilet servicing, hydraulic fluid systems, and deicing or anti-icing servicing. Price: $75.
At press time, the FAA was expected to announce that IFR-certificated GPS receivers may be used in place of ADF and DME readouts and/or NDB bearing information on many instrument approaches. Details are to be published in NOTAMs and in the next editions of the Airport Facility Directory. The new policy won't apply to NDB approaches that don't have a GPS overlay and some GPS databases will need DME and LOM waypoints added.
With the recent sale of its commercial aircraft maintenance business, The Dee Howard Co. returns to focusing primarily on its signature product-thrust reversers for corporate jets (November 1995, page 18). The San Antonio-based firm, a unit of Italy's Finmeccanica/Alenia Aerospace Group, sold its airline and cargo operators maintenance business to Dee Howard Aircraft Maintenance, L.P., a newly formed company owned by Code, Hennessy&Simmons, a Chicago-based private investment group, and the management team of the purchased maintenance unit.
Galaxy Aerospace, the Fort Worth-based marketing and service arm for IAI business jets, designated Jetport at Ontario's Hamilton Airport as an authorized sales and service outlet
It's been almost two years since business aviation veteran James A. Robinson joined Fairchild Aerospace and, apparently, he's engineered an impressive turnaround. "We've taken a lot of cost out of the operation. The [dollar-to-mark] exchange rate is working in our favor; we couldn't have picked a better time for a turnaround," Robinson explained to B/CA. "The 328JET market has taken an interesting turn in the past couple of months. We now believe there is a market for 1,200 jets with less than 50 seats.
Cessna received Transport Canada certification for its Citation X and will designate Innotech-Execair in Toronto as a factory-authorized service and sales center. Innotech FBOs in Montreal and Vancouver are currently authorized Citation facilities.
If you thus far have managed to avoid extensively relying on PCs, fax machines, cellular phones, portable digital assistants and the like in the aviation part of your life, your predigital days are,well, numbered. The familiar confines of most cockpits are about to be transformed into airborne information centers. If you're like most people, you've seen the term "Aeronautical Telecommunications Network" (ATN) in aviation publications for some time.
Voyageur Airways of North Bay, Ontario, has signed a 10-year code-sharing agreement with Air Canada to serve smaller markets in southern Ontario and the Northeast United States with a fleet of 10 new Beech 1900Ds. Air Canada had been talking to several U.S. regionals as well before selecting Voyageur.
Cincinnati-based Executive Jet Management, a unit of Executive Jet Aviation, is guaranteeing aircraft owners a predetermined number of charter hours and income if they put their aircraft on EJM's charter certificate. The program is open to owners of Citation series V through X; Hawker 800s, 800XPs and 1000s; Falcon 50s, 900s and 2000s; Challenger 601s and 604s; and G-IVs, IV-SPs and Vs. Guarantees differ by aircraft type and location, and the typical term is one year.
