Today marks the 60th anniversary of the inaugural flight of the Mystère 20, Dassault Aviation’s first business jet and the first member of what would become the Falcon jet family. Every decade since, Paris-based Dassault has introduced a new Falcon, each raising the bar for performance, comfort, and efficiency. To date, more than 2,700 Falcons have been delivered.
In 1961, as head of the eponymous military and commercial aircraft manufacturer he’d formed after WWII, Marcel Dassault approved the development of the Mystère 20, which was based on the company’s transonic Dassault Mystère IV fighter-bomber and powered by a pair of Pratt & Whitney JT12A-8 turbojet engines (changed to General Electric CF700 turbofans for the production model). With an eye toward the sizable American market, the aircraft was rebranded the Falcon 20 shortly after its first flight in 1963.
The Falcon 20 wowed some of the top aviation leaders of the time, including Charles Lindbergh, Pan Am chief executive Juan Trippe, and FedEx founder Fred Smith. It went on to spawn 27 different model types that found buyers among entrepreneurs, government agencies, and several nations’ armed forces. Overall, Dassault delivered nearly 500 Falcon 20-series aircraft.
Dassault Aviation chairman and CEO Eric Trappier said the “formula has not changed. Every Dassault aircraft must have superb handling, beautiful lines, and rugged construction. And it has to provide state-of-the-art comfort.”
A Washington, D.C. think tank that routinely targets corporations, the police, and private wealth has turned its focus to business aviation. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is promoting its new study, “High Flyers 2023,” as an examination of “how ultra-rich private jet travel costs the rest of us and burns up our planet.” The report charges private aviation with creating a disproportionate environmental footprint and benefitting from unfair tax policy.
The report proposed a variety of measures, including a 10 percent tax on preowned private aircraft sales and a 5 percent tax on new aircraft; doubling the federal fuel tax on business aircraft; imposing a surcharge on flights of less than 210 miles; creating a Sustainable Transportation Equity Trust Fund to fund rail infrastructure and bike lanes; increasing TSA security oversight of private jets; and enacting legislation requiring the FAA to provide full transparency on the ownership of U.S.-registered private aircraft.
NBAA pushed back hard against the IPS study. In a statement issued to AIN, NBAA called it a “misleading and partisan caricature of business aviation” and noted that business aviation is “an essential American industry, supporting more than a million jobs, generating nearly $250 billion in economic activity, connecting towns and communities across the country, and providing flights for worthy humanitarian causes."
Embraer’s executive jet deliveries remained flat in the first three months, matching the eight handed over in first-quarter 2022, the company affirmed today as it released its first-quarter earnings report.
Similar to a year earlier, Embraer handed over six Phenom light jets and two midsize Praetors during the quarter. However, at the same time, Embraer’s executive jets unit brought in $87.1 million in revenues, a 3 percent year-over-year slide that the Brazilian airframer attributed to the mix of light-jet deliveries.
Meanwhile, Embraer remained encouraged by the market in the first quarter, saying that customer orders for new aircraft have exceeded expectations. Backlog for its executive jets nudged up to $4.1 billion at the end of the first quarter, compared with $3.9 billion at the end of 2022 and $2.9 billion at the end of 2021.
Embraer further noted its book-to-bill ratio remained above 2.5:1 and added, “Growth in the light and mid-sized business jet segments has continued into this year, and Embraer is well positioned to capitalize on this growth.”
While executive jets revenues softened in the quarter, commercial aviation revenues were up by nearly $30 million, to $198.8 million. Even so, the manufacturer saw its net loss widen to $88.9 million, an increase from the $75.3 million loss a year earlier.
A panel discussion yesterday on the aerospace industry’s supply-chain problem at the 2023 NBAA Maintenance Conference left little doubt that the business aviation sector has felt the effects as acutely and persistently as any other. According to Textron Aviation supply-chain director Chad Martin, raw-materials shortages had already begun to surface before Covid hit, and the pandemic served to accelerate an already budding issue.
But raw materials and parts shortages presented merely a symptom of the long-running problem of a dearth of qualified labor, noted panel moderator JSSI Parts & Leasing president Ben Hockenberg. The labor problem has, in effect, largely contributed to parts shortages. The most in-demand parts include aircraft windshields and tires, Solairus operations manager Ross Miner told session attendees.
This has required some “outside the box” thinking. Scavenging used parts can help alleviate the problem to a degree, while Duncan Aviation, for example, has tapped its Duncan Manufacturing Solutions (DMS) unit to manufacture its own parts. Other strategies include ordering parts well in advance to account for inevitable delivery delays.
As for when the industry will see a resolution to the supply-chain problem, Duncan v-p of sales and marketing Ryan Huss said he thought the recovery process had reached the seventh inning of a nine-inning game. “By the end of the year, we think we’ll be back to normal,” he concluded.
Duncan Aviation Delivers Major CL300 Mid-Life Inspection Squawk-Free
Nearly 800 CL300 aircraft are flying today, with many approaching their 7500-landing inspection milestone. It is the most comprehensive inspection for the CL300, where all panels are removed, many parts replaced, and the entire airframe inspected. It is a significant undertaking that Duncan Aviation began preparing for years ago.
Satcom Direct will soon be launching an automated carbon reporting module to its SD Pro operating system and demonstrating the tool later this month at EBACE. The company expects the module’s first phase functionality to be ready by August.
The tool uses real-time data generated by the company’s FlightDeck Freedom datalink service, which accurately measures fuel burn. It uses that data to calculate carbon emissions based on the type and amount of fuel burned, including the blend ratio of sustainable aviation fuel. Operators are then presented with validated emissions data that can be parsed by an individual aircraft, a single flight, or an entire fleet.
This data is run through calculations developed to comply with regulatory standards on carbon emission reporting. The resulting reports give operators a variety of metrics, including the amount of carbon dioxide generated, where it was emitted, and how this volume compares to previous trips. The information is presented graphically and can be used to generate carbon certificates, transactional records for purchased credits, and authenticated tracking information, thus streamlining the computations necessary for mandatory and voluntary emission reporting and offsetting.
Further, it will allow users to view their CO2 emissions and access associated certificates and records. Via SD Pro's carbon offsetting platform Patch, operators can purchase carbon offset credits.
The July 1 deadline for airlines to complete 5G C-band tolerant radar altimeter upgrades/alternative methods of compliance will not be moved, according to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) previously noted that the deadline was unrealistic, given ongoing supply-chain issues, and said that the FAA had wildly underestimated the cost of compliance. The trade association pegged this at $638 million versus the FAA's $26 million estimate.
Meanwhile, FAA Acting Administrator Billy Nolen warned that airlines flying noncompliant aircraft after the July 1 deadline will not be able to use low-visibility instrument approaches and, beginning in 2024, would not be able to operate in U.S. airspace.
While some cell carriers have voluntarily agreed to signal-strength mitigation efforts around some airports through 2028, even that may not be enough to reduce travel disruptions, IATA warned, noting that the technological fixes to comply with the July 1 deadline were a temporary solution while a permanent standard is being developed.
IATA senior v-p Nick Careen classified the July 1 requirement as a “temporary holding action,” and said that, “under current scenarios, airlines will have to retrofit most of their aircraft twice in just five years. And with the standards for the second retrofit yet to be developed, we could easily be facing the same supply-chain issues in 2028 that we are struggling with today.”
McMahon Helicopter Services has opened an office and hangar at Canton-Plymouth Mettetal Airport in Michigan, which it will use as its headquarters, operations center, and FAA Part 145 repair station. The newly built 20,000-sq-ft facility is owned by Aerial Assets—a partially owned subsidiary of McMahon.
“This new facility will give us much greater flexibility as we continue to scale our business and simultaneously provide our team with a more efficient office layout and quicker access to major roads and freeways,” said company president Nick McMahon.
Founded in 1980, McMahon is an asset-based, FAA-licensed Part 135 on-demand air carrier and DOT-licensed ground carrier. McMahon operates a fleet of MD 500 and Bell 206L and 430 twin-engine helicopters for its regional charter operations. The company also can provide UAS, rotorcraft external load, agricultural, aerial filming, and hazardous material transport operations and is an approved Transport Canada foreign air carrier with U.S. Customs bonding. Its 24/7 expedited air freight/logistics capability allows full-size, forklift-loadable material to be delivered directly to plant locations.
The first satellite in the ViaSat-3 geostationary satellite constellation was successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 30. Viasat achieved signal acquisition of the satellite nearly five hours after the launch and the next steps include deploying solar arrays and drifting to its final orbital location in about three weeks, according to Viasat.
With coverage planned for the Americas, the first Ka-band ViaSat-3 will be joined by two others, one covering the Asia-Pacific region and another for Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
“Collectively, the three-satellite ViaSat-3 constellation is anticipated to provide more capacity than any other telecommunication network currently in orbit,” said Claudio D’Amico, business area director for Viasat Business Aviation. “Each satellite is anticipated to deliver at least one terabit of data per second (1Tbps)—equal to 1,000 gigabits per second.”
To optimize service to business aviation customers, Viasat can shift satellite capacity to provide more connectivity where it is needed and less where traffic is lower. “By intelligently shifting capacity to match supply with the dynamic level of connectivity demand,” the company said, “especially in concentrated geographical areas—such as popular business aviation routes—Viasat has solved a key challenge for operators, resulting in fast and consistent connectivity during all phases of the flight, and across the entire fleet.”
Sustainability Question of the Week
Sponsored by
Which of the following statements is true about sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and the alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) fuel process?
A. ATJ is a byproduct of creating SAF.
B. ATJ is a method of capturing carbon emissions from aircraft.
C. ATJ is a way of converting renewable feedstocks into jet fuel.
D. ATJ is a technique of recycling used cooking oil into fuel.
Count on AIN for Full Coverage of EBACE
As ever, you can count on AIN for full coverage of EBACE 2023. Our team will publish three of our award-winning daily EBACE Convention News editions at the show on May 23, 24, and 25. We will also have comprehensive real-time reporting of all the top news at AINonline.com and in our daily e-newsletters. If you are an exhibiting company that wants to share news or propose pre-show interviews and briefings, please contact show editor Chad Trautvetter.
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