Safety has long been business aviation’s holy grail, but today that priority encompasses a growing range of risk issues while also becoming entwined with the community’s expanding security component. The threats are real.
On the ground, publicly available real-time flight tracking data provides aircraft ownership details and “actionable information that could be used by anyone with any kind of intent, be that good, bad, or otherwise,” creating identifiable security risks, said Doug Carr, NBAA's senior v-p of safety, security, sustainability, and international operations.
I’m in the cockpit of a modified Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, descending from an altitude of about 4,000 feet down to California’s Yolo County Airport, just west of Sacramento. Seated to my left, the pilot is glancing over his landing checklist but keeps his hands off the controls. The yoke turns and presses forward as we prepare for the landing, all while the pilot’s hands are resting in his lap—almost as if a ghost has taken control of the aircraft.
But there are no ghosts at the helm of this airplane. Rather, it is being flown by Xwing’s trademarked “Superpilot,” a fully autonomous flight system that Xwing installed on this otherwise ordinary aircraft. The Superpilot is capable of taking off, landing, and taxiing without any pilot intervention.
The burgeoning advanced air mobility business received a further boost this week with a pair of respective investment commitments from U.S. major airlines American and Delta in “green” hydrogen power and one of the industry’s most mature eVTOL projects.
American Airlines has made an equity investment in Universal Hydrogen, the California-based company building a green hydrogen distribution and logistics network for aviation. The October 10 announcement follows an agreement in August under which the carrier provisionally agreed with Universal's competitor ZeroAvia to convert up to 100 regional jets with its hydrogen propulsion system.
It takes more than a monster storm and a potentially stifling presidential TFR to knock out the 65th Annual NBAA Convention and Trade Show. With Hurricane Sandy bearing down on the northeastern U.S. on the Saturday before the annual gathering, airlines began a chain of flight cancellations that eventually topped 8,000 before the storm made landfall in southern New Jersey on Monday evening.
With airlines backing out of the picture, the organization itself found that business aviation came to its rescue. “Most of our staff came in early to set up the show,” said NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen. But not everyone made it out before the cascade of flight cancellations. “We brought down several key staff and a speaker on a chartered aircraft that left the Washington, D.C. area on Sunday, in the early evening,” he continued.
Covid-19 and the bonus depreciation offered by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act have both encouraged people to buy business jets and fly privately. However, if you average only 50, 100, or even 150 flight hours per year, owning your own jet may not make as much economic sense as charter and fractional programs.
Nonetheless, there are always people who claim that you can make a business jet pay for itself—and your own flight hours—by chartering it out to third parties. In other words, you buy a jet, cover your costs chartering it, and in effect fly for free. Is this scenario too good to be true? Let’s take a look.
The Paris Criminal Court this week started hearing a potential landmark case in which Airbus and Air France stand accused of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of 228 passengers and crew aboard an A330 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to the French capital on June 1, 2009. At opening proceedings on Monday afternoon for a case expected to run into early December, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury and his Air France counterpart Anne Rigail both entered not-guilty pleas on behalf of their organizations.
The criminal proceedings into who is to blame for the loss of flight AF447 have begun just over ten years after France’s BEA accident investigation agency issued its final report. Its conclusions mainly focused on how the A330’s pilot had repeatedly tried to get the aircraft to pitch up, based on incorrect air speed data due to frozen pitot probes and confusing stall alert cockpit warnings.
When TAG Aviation Holding sold off its assets in 2019 and 2020 and divested from the aviation industry, some may have thought that would be the end of the legacy brand. But its core aircraft and charter management businesses—which were sold entirely to its Asian joint-venture partner Young Brothers Aviation and another private investor—have continued the TAG Aviation name.
“It’s the same TAG logo, the same heritage, the same legacy,” said Steven Young, CEO of TAG Aviation and president of the company’s Asia division. As one of the founding shareholders of TAG Asia, he has had a stake in the company for the past 16 years. “There was no shareholder exchange, there was a shareholder adjustment. In other words, I continued with my shareholding, I just increased it.”
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