Altour, a travel company, teamed with private jet services company Whirlwind Jet to form a new charter brokerage, Altour Air. The new company will arrange domestic or international charter flights for individuals, businesses and large groups. Altour Air also will facilitate ground transportation through Altour affiliate Altour Limousine. Altour 1270 Ave. of the Americas, 15th Fl. New York, NY 10020 Phone: (212) 897-5000 or (800) 847-7466 Fax: (212) 897-5134 www.altour.com
FARMERS ARE NOTORIOUSLY tight with a dollar. But even the most parsimonious of farmers knows that no matter how good or bad this year's harvest, he has to set aside enough money to buy seed for next season's planting -- or he won't have a crop.
Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh has purchased four Eurocopter EC 145s for Allegheny's LifeFlight AMS service. The decision to buy the four EC 145s came after Allegheny conducted a competitive bidding process in which Agusta, American Eurocopter and Bell took part. Two of the EC 145s will be delivered in early 2007; the other two in mid-2007. Configured for a pilot and up to nine passengers, the EC 145 is powered by two Turbomeca Arriel 1E2 turbine engines.
Evergreen Air Center, Marana, Ariz., has appointed T.J. "Jim" Toomey as its new president. If you would like to submit news of hires, promotions, appointments or awards for possible publication in On Duty, send e-mail to [email protected] or call (914) 933-7614.
SOUTHWEST-BOUND ON V39 the other day, I looked down and watched Reading, Pa.'s Carl A. Spaatz Field pass by. More major highways laced the vicinity, and development was denser than when I, and a hundred thousand others, used to make the journey there each June to the air show, which marked the beginning of every aviation summer.
Raytheon Aircraft Co., Wichita, has announced two new leadership positions: Randy Groom has been appointed president, Global Customer Service and Support, and Brad Hatt assumes the role of president, Global Commercial Sales for Beechcraft and Hawker. Chris Charnley was appointed regional vice president of sales for Canada and Latin America.
More than a half-century before the 1989 movie "Field of Dreams" brought to the silver screen the wholesome goodness and potential for renewal that the fertile farmlands of Iowa can offer, the Elliott family was sowing the seeds of general aviation in the state's Quad Cities area. With the same fervor that the film's lead character, farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), pursued his dream of building a baseball diamond in the heartland, Herb Elliott nurtured grassroots aviation in the Midwest.
Corporate operators received a reprieve from two tax measures in a bill that would have dramatically increased the tax burden for use of aircraft for personal or recreational purposes. House and Senate negotiators agreed to strip out the two measures in the Tax Relief Act of 2005 that would have increased the tax liability of business executives who use company aircraft for personal reasons and limit the tax benefits companies receive when the aircraft are used for recreation. The House passed the Tax Relief Act on May 10, followed by the Senate the next day.
Honeywell has announced software upgrades for the GNS-XLS Enhanced FMS. New European and U.S. standards include Precision Area Navigation (P-RNAV) compliance, AC 90-100 compliance and memory expansion to allow for a worldwide navigation database. The new software enables access to a 20 megabyte PCMCIA memory card containing the 28-day Worldwide Navigational Database, which succeeds the multiple regional databases currently used by the GNS-XLS, allowing operators to load a single database, regardless of where the aircraft travels in the world.
Seemingly contradicting the conclusions of the Eurocontrol air traffic report (see above), Bo Redeborn, director of ATM Strategies at Eurocontrol, said, "Growth on these levels presents a number of challenges for air traffic management. Business aviation generates peaks of demand at airports, and while it uses different flight levels from the major carriers, getting the different types of traffic to their preferred levels creates additional traffic complexity for controllers, particularly given the concentration of business aviation in an already busy airspace.
ExxonMobil Aviation International, Ltd., Fairfax, Va., appointed Kenny Warren as director, Global Aviation Fuels. If you would like to submit news of hires, promotions, appointments or awards for possible publication in On Duty, send e-mail to [email protected] or call (914) 933-7614.
Frasca International has delivered the first of six TruFlite H helicopter simulators to Silver State Helicopters of North Las Vegas, Nev. The units are installed in mobile trailers and will be assigned to training facilities in the United States. Silver State has ordered 22 simulators, which are reconfigurable as the piston-powered Robinson R22 and R44 and the Schweizer 300.
Embraer has announced the launch of Embraer Executive Care, a comprehensive customer support program designed to provide the highest level of aircraft availability and utilization, and maintenance cost predictability. The new program, derived from the current Total Legacy Care program, offers broader coverage and covers all of Embraer's executive jets. The new Embraer Executive Care program offers the flexibility to suit a variety of customer operation profiles. It covers scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, OEM parts replacement and maintenance tracking and control.
Three industry veterans -- Michael Sowa, Kenneth Murray and Robert Liddell -- have joined together to form Atlanta-based Waypoint Partners, LLC, a new firm devoted to facilitating and managing the completion, modification and refurbishment of high-end business aircraft. In addition, the company, which also has offices in Houston and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., will provide aircraft pre-purchase monitoring assistance, aircraft-acquisition consulting, operational startup assistance and vendor mediation.
M7 Aerospace, San Antonio, appointed Harold J.M. (Mac) Williams vice chairman with continued service as a member of the board. He will focus on strategic development for the company with special emphasis on government programs. Ronald W. Frederick has been named president and CEO.
From its headquarters in Tempe, Ariz., MedAire provides remote assistance to business fliers worldwide 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company says it averages roughly 75 incidents every day, which would make it the world's busiest virtual ER. Even a trained flight crew can't cope with every medical emergency, and it helps to call in expert advice anytime you deploy an AED for cardiac distress.
Vern Raburn, CEO of Eclipse Aviation, and Roel Pieper, founder of Luxembourg-based ETIRC Aviation, announced at EBACE that they've signed an agreement for ETIRC Aviation's distribution of Eclipse 500 aircraft in the Russian Federation, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Ukraine and Turkey. Pieper said he can generate sales of 50 aircraft per year in Russia, 25 aircraft annually in Ukraine, another 25 to 50 in Turkey, and possibly 25 aircraft per year in Kazakhstan.
Safe Flight Instrument Corp. reports the first two installations of its AutoPower Automatic Throttle System for the new wide-cabin Challenger 850 aircraft are proceeding on schedule. Bombardier offers AutoPower as a production option on the Challenger 850 business jet and the CRJ 200 airliner, a retrofit option on the Challenger 604 and as standard equipment on the new Challenger 605 widebody jet, launched in November 2005.
Executive Jet Management has placed a new aircraft on its FAR Part 135 Certificate as it was delivered directly from the factory for a charter management client, Sho-Deen Aircraft of Geneva, Ill. -- for the second time in five years. Just because an aircraft is new, it does not automatically conforms to the specific requirements of a Part 135 certificate. Paperwork especially must conform to format as well as content. There are tons of minutiae that typically involve substantial downtime for the process.
I guarantee you that I like the term "throttle" to control engine output because there's little ambiguity as to its function. The problem is that "throttle," "thrust lever" and "power control lever" are used by different airplane manufacturers to denote the control that modulates engine thrust output.
