LABACE Returns To the World Stage

LABACE, Latin America’s largest business aviation event, returns after three years to an altered world. The players have changed in both the commercial and the business aviation worlds, and the pandemic has brought new customers to private aviation. As usual, the show, at São Paulo Congonhas Airport, lasts for three days (August 9-11) and doesn’t get started until 12 p.m. each day then welcoming visitors to convivial conversations in the evening among the static display and exhibits until 8 p.m. (and often later).

Legislation finally regulating fractional ownership in Brazil has brought new firms to offer fractional shares and new flyers to purchase them. More airports have moved from public to private management, others will soon do so, and Brazil’s first private business aviation airport, Catarina, has opened and prospered. World demand for agricultural commodities has left those in Brazil’s agribusiness with hard currency in their pockets, along with a perpetual need to more easily reach far-flung fields of crops or herds.

And eVTOLs seem as close to fruition in Brazil as anywhere on Earth, not only as home to Embraer’s Eve spin-off—one of the strong contenders to be among the winners in the race to create a viable electric aircraft ecosystem—but as having already been the location of the first trials to use helicopters to replicate future urban air mobility (UAM) operations.

Satcom Direct Keeps Bandeirante Connected

Airborne mapping and sensing provider Fototerra needed a better way to transmit surveillance information for its oil and gas customers in Brazil, so the company looked into available satellite communications systems. However, satcoms that would fit on Fototerra’s Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante twin-turboprop offered limited speed and bandwidth, not enough to efficiently offload the massive amount of data gathered by the airplane while in flight, so the customer had to wait until the airplane neared the coast to transmit data via short-range microwave.

To solve this problem, Fototerra asked Satcom Direct (SD) if its Plane Simple satcom terminal and antenna system could fit into the EMB 110, and the result was a plan to develop a supplemental type certificate (STC) for the installation. The EMB 110 STC will be the first Plane Simple satcom installation in a special-mission aircraft and on a turboprop, according to Ewerton Libanio, managing director of SD Brazil. The STC is being developed by one of SD’s two dealers in Latin America, Jazz Engenharia Aeronáutica, based in Minas Garais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Falcon 8X and 2000LXS Fly into LABACE

Dassault Aviation is the manufacturer of the largest business jets on display at the 17th edition of LABACE. The French company’s exhibit at Congonhas Airport in São Paulo will include a three-engine Falcon 8X and twin-engine Falcon 2000LXS.

More than 550 of the Falcon 2000LXS have been delivered since the jet entered service in 1995. Capable of carrying six passengers 4,000 nm at Mach 0.80, the 2000LXS’s cabin measures 7 foot 8 inches wide and 6 feet 2 inches tall. Maximum operating speed is Mach 0.85, and it can take off at sea level at maximum takeoff weight (42,800 pounds) in 4,675 feet.

As Bizav Grows in Brazil, Embraer Expands Sorocaba MRO

The opening of Embraer’s expanded MRO facility in Sorocaba, Brazil, on June 21 is mostly in response to a growing business jet fleet in its home country. The Sorocaba expansion doubles the airframer’s service and support facility footprint there from 20,000 sq m (215,278 sq ft) to 40,000 sq m. The site now boasts four hangars, three of which are dedicated to aircraft and component MRO, with the fourth supporting the company’s FBO there.

“There is consistent growth in the executive aviation segment in Brazil and we see great opportunities for the service sector in the coming years, aligned with our growth plans for both the services and support business unit and Embraer itself,” said Embraer Services & Support president and CEO Johann Bordais.