Business & Commercial Aviation

Quintus Technologies has been selected by Gulfstream Aerospace to provide a high-pressure fluid cell press. The Flexform press will go to Gulfstream's Mexicali, Mexico, facility, which produces wiring harnesses, sheet metal components, subassemblies and machine parts, Quintus said. “The Flexform process requires only one rigid tool half; the other tool half is a flexible rubber diaphragm under uniform hydrostatic pressure,” the company says.

Once again, BCA editors and our business aviation colleagues from the Aviation Week Network have recommended BCA content from this year that readers might want to revisit.

From line boy to flight instructor, charter pilot and CEO, Charlie Priester helped steer Priester Aviation to prominence.

The ability to quickly diagnose a problem and come up with a solution is a valuable skill, even when you earn your living working on multimillion-dollar aircraft.

Teterboro Airport ranked No. 1 again, and the rest of the top five business aviation airports measured by acukwik.com user traffic during October 2016 were mostly stable, according to site metrics.

Jet-A And Avgas Per-Gallon Fuel Prices November 2016

STOL aircraft still might be very much special purpose vehicles, but the special purposes are a lot less remote than most of us are aware. Convair 600 Executive is equipped with Rolls-Royce Dart RDa IO’s, and will carry 19 including crew. Price of conversion to owner’s Convair 240, 340 or 440 is about $682,720.

The annual gala dinner, or soiree, and auction sponsored by NBAA at its convention to benefit the Corporate Angel Network (CAN) raised $450,000 to help fund that organization’s decades-long mission to transport cancer patients to treatment centers, mainly aboard business jets, free of charge. CAN Executive Director Gina Russo said, “We very much appreciate the industry’s involvement in CAN’s work, as illustrated by the hundreds of companies flying CAN missions for cancer patients year-round, as well as through participation in this event.

Blackhawk Modifications has launched another engine upgrade program, this time targeting the King Air 350. The switch involves replacing that aircraft’s 1,050 shp PT6A-60A engines with a pair of -67As, each rated at 1,200 shp. The Waco, Texas company expects to receive approval for the upgrade in the second quarter of 2017. The change-out will benefit those operators — including military units — needing improved hot-and-high performance.

JetBlue Airways has taken a minority stake in fast-growing, California-based jet-charter company JetSuite. Robin Hayes, CEO of the New York-based low cost carrier, said JetSuite was “changing the game in short-haul travel in the West Coast.” Launched in 2009, JetSuite operates up to four daily flights between the California cities of Burbank, Carlsbad, Concord and San Jose, as well as Las Vegas. For this JetSuiteX service, the carrier sells tickets on its Embraer 135 jets via its website as a public-charter operation.

Jeppesen has launched Operator, a cloud-based business aviation platform that integrates flight planning, runway performance and weight and balance calculations, crew scheduling, accounting, pricing, regulatory compliance and trip checklists, among other things. BoldIQ, the fleet optimization and management program that evolved from the failed DayJet operation is intrinsic to the new Jepp service.

The FAA officially awarded Cirrus Aircraft its type certificate for the $1.96 million, 300-kt. single-engine turbofan SF50 Vision Jet at the National Business Aviation Association annual convention. The approval comes after an intensive four-year development program. The Vision Jet is powered by a 1,840-lb.-thrust Williams International FJ33-5A, and features a Perspective Touch flight deck powered by Garmin G3000 avionics.

Satcom Direct, the airborne connectivity services provider headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, plans to acquire TrueNorth, a 10-year-old avionics manufacturer based in Ottawa. Jim Jensen, the founder and CEO of Satcom Direct, says the transaction should close before year-end. Just two months earlier, the company bought AircraftLogs, which makes flight scheduling and tax reporting software. (See “Special Report: 2016 IFEC: the Internet of Aviation Things” on page 26 of this issue.)

Selected Accidents and incidents in October 2016. The following is NTSB information.

Rolls-Royce reports that it now has 2,000 business jets enrolled in its CorporateCare engine maintenance program—double the number covered in 2010, or better than two-thirds of the eligible fleet. The program brings guaranteed maintenance costs to new and in-service Rolls-Royce BR725, BR710, Tay and AE 3007 engines. Operators pay a fixed cost-per-flying-hour fee for a comprehensive range of scheduled and unscheduled engine maintenance events and benefits. The reason for the program’s popularity, according to Stephen M.

The space-based Global Positioning System could be said to be the keystone of the FAA's NextGen ATM modernization but just how reliable is GPS? To find out, we asked John Hansman, Ph.D., an aeronautics professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Heli-One will upgrade a fleet of Sikorsky S-61A-4 Nuri helicopters for an Asian operator with Universal's EFI-890H Advanced Flight Displays and Multi-Missions Management System. Heli-One will design and install the initial aircraft with an Asian maintenance, repair and overhaul business performing the upgrades on the remainder of the fleet. The upgrade includes four EFI-890H Advanced Flight Displays and one UNS-1L2 MMMS, Universal’s flight management system for mission support.

The business-jet resale market turned in slightly slower transaction activity during the first nine months of 2016, according to a report by Amstat.

Chengdu Aircraft, the fighter division of China's Avic Aviation, is planning to develop a business jet. The new aircraft, which was detailed at Airshow China in November, would have a range of 5,000 sm and a length and wingspan of 80 ft. The project was set when Chengdu was formed in 2008, but little progress seems to have been made, especially since all Western makers of business aircraft declined Avic’s invitation for cooperation. Obviously, none saw any reason to train a competitor.

BCA shares news of the latest products and services for the business aviation industry.

Performance-based navigation promises to make air traffic management more efficient than ever before . . . but what does this mean for business aviation?

Russian investigators concluded that alcohol use by a shift supervisor and a snowplow driver at Moscow's Vnukovo International Airport played role in the October 2014 nighttime collision that destroyed a departing Unijet Airlines Dassault Falcon 50EX and killed all four on board. The snowplow driver was crossing Runway 6, but stopped as the jet began its takeoff roll. The Falcon hit the plow with its right wing and right main gear at a speed of 133 kt., rolled inverted, crashed and burned.

FlightSafety International filed a lawsuit Oct. 25 related to the 2014 crash of a King Air B200 into a FlightSafety training facility shortly after takeoff from Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport. The crash killed four, including the pilot, and injured six others. The lawsuit, filed in Sedgwick County District Court in Wichita, names more than a dozen defendants alleged to have contributed to the crash through negligence, breach of warranty or other factors.

The Citation 560XL family is one of the best examples of Cessna Aircraft's time-proven incremental engineering and development philosophy that has produced so many derivative models on time, on weight and on budget. Created in the mid-1990s as a rush response to the clean-sheet, leading edge Learjet 45, Citation 560XL combines a shortened Citation 650 fuselage, a scaled up and modified Citation V wing and newly introduced PW545 turbofan engines.

Bombardier's third-quarter financial results show the Canadian company's turnaround plan is gaining momentum. “We are executing on our growth program with certification of the CS300 and first flight of the Global 7000,” CEO Alain Bellemare told analysts on Nov. 10. “And we are executing on our turnaround plan.” The Montreal-based company said it expected full-year earnings of US $350-400 million, and free cash flow to be $1.15-1.45 billion, an improvement from previous projections.