Moscow Vnukovo Airport and Lufthansa Flight Training agreed to form a joint venture to provide flight crew training. Flight Training Vnukovo will start operations by mid-2010 and will be equipped with four full-flight simulators. The facility is planned to be expanded to accommodate up to 20 simulators for various aircraft types. The $200 million facility would be the first independent simulator center in the Russian territory.
The vastness of the United States can be best appreciated from a vantage point eight miles above it. My flight deck vista has widened my perspective of the country, which is a colorful collage of cultures spread across nearly four million square miles, encompassing mountain ranges, expansive plains, arid deserts, grand cities, small towns and seemingly endless coastlines. And few occasions underscore the country’s size and splendor better than a transcontinental flight.
That night the two rock performers — one a drummer, the other a DJ — had wowed a crowd of 10,000 people at a free concert near the University of South Carolina. Now, even though it was approaching midnight, they wanted to get home to California. They, along with two support staffers, boarded the chartered Learjet Model 60 that had landed at Columbia Metropolitan Airport 40 minutes earlier. The passengers took their seats, the cabin door was closed and locked, and the two pilots began to taxi to the active runway. It was Sept. 19, 2008.
The National Air Transportation Association has named Wyvern Consulting the exclusive sales and support organization for its recently launched IC Check, a comprehensive compliance-driven flight release system for professionally flown general aviation aircraft operations. IC Check is an online application that assesses “whether individual flights for which an operator exercises operational control are flown with a legal crew, legal passengers, legal aircraft and legal flight parameters,” NATA said.
Hawker Beechcraft has begun offering a Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) Localizer Performance with Vertical Guidance (LPV) option for Hawker 800XP aircraft. The upgrade enables operators to fly more precision approaches, reduce decision altitudes to as low as 200 feet agl and visibility minimums to as low as one-half mile, and use GPS as a primary means of navigation from takeoff through approach.
Metis Systems, a division of DHK Holdings, LLC, has just released version 1.2 of the eAPIS Tool. This program safely and securely saves all of your aircraft, pilot and passenger data on your computer and makes submitting a Customs eAPIS manifiest a snap, according to the company. It validates your data against the Business Rules published by Customs, then prepares a fullly compliant and sufficient “.xml” file that can be uploaded to the eAPIS Web site. The tool keeps information in several tables that interact with the part of the program that produces the file.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection really wants to expand its freedom to operate unmanned aerial vehicles in regular airspace. CBP’s Office of Air and Marine says it achieved several agency firsts using UAVs to patrol the land and water border between Canada and New York. Operation Empire Shield, which ended June 25, was designed to demonstrate unmanned aircraft operations and evaluate law enforcement coordination over land and maritime environments at the northern border.
Used business jet inventories continue to show signs of stabilization, according to the latest reports from two analysts. Inventories tracked by UBS dropped 2 percent in June after sequential increases in each of the prior 18 months; meanwhile, J.P. Morgan found inventory relatively flat. But both analysts continue to point to troubling indicators. “Despite the decline this time, available inventories are still 48 percent higher from the prior year and represent 17 percent of the installed base,” UBS said. J.P.
The University of Dayton Research Institute’s Patrick Haines and James Luers have been vocal advocates for exploring the effects of heavy rain on aircraft performance and have applied forensic engineering methods to several accidents. Their methodology, which was published in the Journal of Aircraft, suggests that the previously calculated effects of wind shear were in error, and that heavy rain likely contributed to the loss of performance in many mishaps.
Looking for help with your foggy or scratched windows? Check out the NBAA’s Products and Services Directory to locate outfits that specialize in aircraft window repair and replacement. First, access the Web site at http://data.nbaa.org/prodsvcs/directory/search.cfm, and then from the pull-down Categories menu select Window/Windscreen Repair.
Especially in today’s volatile market, Rick Engles believes it is critical that aircraft brokers clearly communicate to prospective airplane sellers what the true value of their aircraft is.
Jet-A and AvgasPer Gallon Fuel PricesJuly 2009 Jet-A and AvgasPer Gallon Fuel PricesJuly 2009 Jet-A Region High Low Average Eastern $7.06 $3.10 $4.98 New England $5.25 $3.44
The AOPA has expressed concern over the FAA’s push to extinguish all existing “through-the-fence” access at public-use airports involving homes and businesses on private property that have access to airport taxiways or runways. The AOPA says the problem is of particular concern in the Northwest where the FAA is conducting an inventory of airports that have existing through-the-fence operations and is pressuring airport sponsors to eventually eliminate that access.
There’s not another current production business aircraft that can beat the Learjet 60 in a time-to-climb contest. With a weight-to-thrust ratio of 2.55:1, you can soar from sea level to FL 410 in less than 18 minutes. It’s also fuel efficient. After level off, its Pratt & Whitney Canada PW305A engines enable the Learjet 60 to cruise at 440 KTAS with an average fuel burn of 1,300 pph.
Rockwell Collins’ Corporate Aircraft Service Program (CASP) offers corporate aircraft operators maintenance for their avionics and cabin entertainment equipment. Rentals, exchanges, component repairs, comprehensive reliability upgrades, equipment removal and refit coverage are included. CASP also offers one consolidated annual invoice based on a forecast of annual operating hours received at the start of the annual program and covers each aircraft for an entire year.
The AOPA’s Aviation eBrief says both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are backing an FAA reauthorization bill introduced in mid-July that would accelerate NextGen implementation. The bill would require satellite-based ATC at the 35 busiest U.S. airports by 2014, with the rest of the country coming online by 2018 with $40 billion in funding through 2011 but with out-year system funding unspecified, postponing the tough decisions until 2011, AOPA states as we go to press.
The following abbreviations are used throughout the tables: “NA” means not available; “—”indicates the performance is not applicable; “NP” signifies that the specific performance is not possible.
Rolls-Royce has received European certification for the BR700-725A1-12 turbofan that will power the Gulfstream G650 business jet. The European Aviation Safety Agency granted approval on June 23. First flight of the G650 is planned for later this year. The 16,100-pound-thrust engine features a 50-inch fan and 24 titanium blades.
You awake in the hotel room, turn on The Weather Channel and see red- and orange-colored warning areas promising thunderstorms on your return flight. A last check of the WSI weather screen when leaving the FBO shows the line of CBs growing in size and intensity, directly on your route home. Throughout the flight you keep adjusting the weather radar to pick your way around the cells.
There has been a great deal of talk about the damage that has been done to business aviation by politicians, the news media and ignorant senior executives. I don’t see it that way. Much of the “damage” was the predictable result of companies that leaned too strongly into unsustainable economic winds. When those economic winds stopped, they fell on their faces. Their companies, and their travel resources, have gone through the normal Darwinian process of the survival of the fittest.
New Zealand-based aircraft tracking company spidertracks has launched spiderwatch, a flight following component that actively watches over every flight. The company is positioning the system as an alternative to ELTs. Spiderwatch is automatically turned on when the aircraft accelerates through 40 knots. This tells the system to “actively monitor the flight. If the spider tracking device loses power, the system loses contact with the spider, triggering text and e-mail alerts to be automatically sent to recipients designated by the user.
I enjoyed your recent article about night visual traps (Cause & Circumstance, June, page 68). A convincing case could be made that, unless you’re over a built-up area with lots of lighting, there really is no such thing as night VFR.
