News

Van Nuys, Calif.-based The Air Group, a large full-service business and private aircraft management company, said earlier this month it had added six new jets to its nationwide fleet so far this year. The aircraft include a Gulfstream GIVSP based at Teterboro, N.J., a Gulfstream GIV based at both Van Nuys and in Tokyo, a […]

It’s no secret that the fractional aircraft ownership concept has spread worldwide from its humble beginnings with what became the NetJets concept in 1986. Proving you can’t keep a good idea down, a company billing itself as India’s first domestic fractional operator — Club One Air — recently announced starting operations. Club One Air, whose […]

If you know the name Darrell “Dee” Howard, either you’ve been around the business aviation industry a while or, most likely, have read about the post-WWII conversions of bombers and transports into sleek, winged corporate chariots on which his namesake’s company made its reputation in the ’50s and ’60s. Howard, now in his mid-80s, also […]

Fractional ownership customers — as well as flight crews and vendors — may think the recent filing by Delta Air Lines for protection under federal bankruptcy laws won’t impact them. Hopefully, they’ll be right, but not because Delta isn’t involved in the business aviation industry. Instead, Delta AirElite Business Jets is a wholly owned subsidiary […]

Swiss-based Jet Aviation announced it will take over a former Crossair hangar at the Basel airport on Oct. 1, under a recently executed lease agreement with Swiss International Air Lines and the airport authorities. According to the company, the additional hangar space of 5,000 square meters brings to 20,000 square meters the facility’s hangar capacity, […]

Moving away from the VLJ market, Dassault Aviation last week announced the third copy of its to-be-certificated Falcon 7X trijet took off for its maiden flight on Sept. 20. The 01:43 flight — from a company facility in Bordeaux-Merignac, France, to the Dassault Aviation Flight Test Center in Istres, France — was crewed by Dominique […]

If Eclipse Aviation is the upstart contender in the VLJ sweepstakes, Cessna Aircraft is the grizzled veteran. While Cessna’s FAA-certification target of late 2006 for its Citation Mustang likely will not win the race to be first to certify what many in the industry are labeling a VLJ, the company is selling enough of its […]

Following closely on the heels of the end of static airframe testing, Eclipse Aviation this week announced its fleet of five certification-research aircraft has flown a combined 500 hours of test flights. Eclipse said flight tests completed thus far in its certification program included lightweight foreign object debris (FOD) testing at power settings up to […]

Eclipse Aviation’s entry into the coming very light jet (VLJ) sweepstakes cleared another major hurdle on its rush toward certification earlier this month when the company completed FAA-required static testing of the Eclipse 500 airframe. According to the company, the FAA approved the airframe for an initial 10,000-hour lifetime, which Eclipse says “is significantly higher […]

…the next issue of AVweb‘s BizAVflash will be e-mailed to you on Sept. 28. See you then…