Also, if traffic is heavy at the destination airport and there are delays, don’t expect to be stacked into holding, Parke emphasized. “Russian controllers do not use holding patterns and vector everyone around if there are delays. This increases their workload considerably and contributes to the delays. During this maneuvering, it behooves you to keep your head up, as most of their aircraft are not equipped with TCAS for separation. They also maintain larger separation intervals than we do, which helps to string things out and adds to the delays.”
NBAA and GAMA are hoping to dispel the “fat cat” perception of business aviation with a new report that stresses the role business aviation plays among small and medium-size companies. The report is the second released by the associations in recent weeks to fight the negative public image of business aviation. Unlike a prior report, “Business Aviation — An Enterprise Value Proposition,” which links business aviation with the success of top companies, the latest report focuses on the range of companies and employees that have used business aviation.
Like the Chinese (see “Ding Hao! Operating in China,” October 2009, page 36), the Russians prefer that aircraft fly the published airways. “You can ask for a direct routing, but you can’t take it for granted that you’ll receive the clearance,” Pahl said. “We take the conservative approach and put them on the airways, and most of our clients fly what we file for them. ATC is getting better at accommodating general aviation, though.
At NBAA, Embraer unveiled its new Legacy 650, an improved version of the popular super mid-sized Legacy 600 that can fly 3,900 nm, some 500 nm farther than the Legacy 600 with the same payload and better performance, or that can carry another 2,500 pounds of payload over the same 3,400-nm range of the 600.
I enjoyed your September article on the Dassault Falcon 2000LX very much (page 48). As an operator of two of these aircraft it was of great interest to me and I would like to add we enjoy our aircraft very much.
The White House nominated Erroll G. Southers as the next TSA administrator and assistant Homeland Security secretary. This selection had been widely anticipated for weeks, but the White House was waiting until Congress returned from its late-summer break to make the announcement. Senior lawmakers have apparently been briefed and have given their approval. Southers is assistant chief of the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department’s Office of Homeland Security and Intelligence.
On Sept. 18, the FAA granted TSO authorization for Aspen Avionics’ EFD500 MFD, its EFD1000 MFD and the EWR50 Evolution Weather Receiver. With certification and production authority in hand, Aspen immediately began shipping the products to its dealers.
Sentient Jet, the Weymouth, Mass.-based private membership and charter provider, has opened new corporate offices in New York City. Sentient’s operations and command center will remain in Weymouth. The Weymouth and New York City offices will be supported by Sentient’s network of regional bases in Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Pittsburgh and Providence, along with three in California (San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange County). Sentient said the addition comes as its membership and charter programs continue to grow.
Cutter Aviation has expanded its on-demand charter operations to the Dallas/Fort Worth market through its new base at Collin County Regional Airport in McKinney, Texas. The company offers on-demand charter on a Hawker Beechcraft 400XP from the McKinney location. Cutter also offers charter from locations in Phoenix and Albuquerque.
As you wrote in your July Viewpoint (“A Matter of Perception,” page 9), public perception of business jets may be different from the reality, and that is especially so in Europe where we see a lot of aircraft whose owners hide under exotic registrations or companies.
Concerns over climate change add justification for a modernized U.S. air traffic control system, Time magazine reports, according to the Aerospace Industries Association. Under threat of a carbon tax, and for fuel savings, the aviation industry wants to fly the most economical routes possible, but the current airway and airport approach systems force inefficient routing. If the NextGen system is rolled out by 2018 as planned, airlines will use about one billion gallons less fuel, the FAA estimates.
Frasca International received FAA Level 7 qualification on its AS350 B2 helicopter flight training device (FTD) installed at FlightSafety International’s helicopter learning center in Tucson, Ariz. Frasca also is designing and building a Sikorsky S-76C++ helicopter simulator training device for Era Training Center in Lake Charles, La. That device, the third ordered by Era, will be Level 6 qualified. Era also uses Frasca trainers for the EC135 helicopter.
CRS Jet Spares, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., welcomes Stephanie Wilson to its team in the role of marketing coordinator. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla., announced that Dr. Frank Ayers has been selected as executive vice president for its Prescott, Ariz., campus replacing Dan Carrell, who is retiring after 23 years in campus leadership at Embry-Riddle Prescott.
On a cold, rainy IMC night in November 1993, a 13-year-old Bell 206L was en route from the rural coastal community of Ellsworth, Maine, with a 70-year-old burn victim, two medical specialists and a pilot aboard. The helicopter ran out of fuel and crashed into Casco Bay, a few miles from Portland General Hospital, its destination. The pilot survived, but the three others aboard died. Search efforts located two of the passengers four days later in the submerged, inverted helicopter.
Forty-four percent of available fractional business jet fleet shares remained unsold at the beginning of September. Excluding card programs, the 66-percent level of purchased shares is significantly lower compared to 71 percent a year ago and to the historical average of 73 percent, according to a UBS Business Jet Report issued in September. New share sales, including renewals, are off 50 percent from the recent peak in 2007, it said.
The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy conduct “functional check flights” to determine whether an aircraft, engine, accessories or equipment works according to established standards. Some of the situations requiring a check flight include: After completion of aircraft rework; After the installation or reinstallation of an engine, propeller, propeller governor, major fuel system component, helicopter drive train, transmission or gearbox; When a fixed flight surface has been installed or reinstalled;
The FAA’s Customer Service Initiative is dead. Long live the Consistency and Standardization Initiative. FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt announced a new focus on improving the agency’s response to public safety complaints and internal whistle-blowers, as well as remedying its notoriously inconsistent interpretation of agency regulations and policies. The FAA’s new Consistency and Standardization Initiative (CSI) began life as the Customer Service Initiative in 2004.
Senior FAA officials emphatically say they are committed to take account of the recent RTCA report on ATC modernization efforts and will use its findings to reshape NextGen priorities and make better use of existing technologies. The findings of an RTCA industry/government task force give the FAA “an excellent head start on the acceleration” of the modernization program, said FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt at the annual Air Traffic Control Association conference.
In an attempt to bolster its user base, NetJets is advertising the availability of “pre-owned” fractional ownership shares in publications such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, explaining on its Web site, that, “When a NetJets owner upgrades from one aircraft type to another or when an owner leaves the program, a pre-owned share may become available for resale.
Project Phoenix has delivered its first Phoenix CRJ to a Macau-based businessman. The delivery took place on Aug. 24 at the Flying Colours Corp. completion facility in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.
By definition, low-level wind shear is a localized meteorological event occurring below 2,000 feet of altitude when an aircraft encounters rapidly changing wind speed or direction over a particular distance or time. When the encounter occurs at very low altitude — say, at takeoff or landing — there’s a very real possibility of the pilot losing control.
ICAO members have reached agreement on environmental targets for the global aviation sector, although it is setting higher fuel efficiency standards than industry was proposing. After a high-level meeting in Montreal that ended Oct. 9, ICAO released a declaration of environmental goals for aviation, including a 2-percent annual improvement in fuel efficiency through 2020. This target is higher than the 1.5 percent proposed by the International Air Transport Association and other aviation industry groups.
EADS and Eurocopter have signed a cooperation agreement with the sovereign wealth fund SAMRUK-KAZYNA to create a public-private joint venture in Kazakhstan to develop helicopter services. The project includes both European and Kazakh partners. The signing took place during the recent official visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Kazakhstan. The joint venture will transfer skills to local partners to develop an indigenous helicopter service industry in Kazakhstan.
