Charter and fractional provider FlyExclusive will bolster its floating aircraft fleet of more than 90 jets with the purchase of 14 midsize Citation XLS Gen2 and super-midsize Longitude business jets from Textron Aviation, the Kinston, North Carolina-based company announced Tuesday at NBAA-BACE 2022. This comes on the heels of plans disclosed Monday by FlyExclusive to go public through a business combination with EG Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by EnTrust Global and GMF Capital.
Deliveries of the eight XLS Gen2s are expected in 2024, followed by deliveries of two of six Longitudes beginning in 2025. FlyExclusive did not detail the terms of the agreement but at list prices the orders could carry a value of upwards of $280 million.
Founded more than seven years ago, FlyExclusive has increased its membership by triple digits and has a retention rate of 94 percent among existing members. For 2022, it estimates a profit of $32 million on revenue of more than $360 million. Last year, the company flew more than 46,000 hours, a more than 46 percent increase from 2020.
Under the terms of the business combination agreement, FlyExclusive’s pre-transaction equity value is $600 million, and the deal is expected to provide up to $300 million in proceeds.
NBAA-BACE 2022 entered the “space race” Tuesday morning with a keynote opening session featuring Nascar Hall of Fame driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. They provided inspiring personal perspectives on creativity, innovation, high-speed environments, and aiming high that resounded strongly with the full-house audience.
Though his father was a legendary racing star, Earnhardt said his only goal when he began his career was to win one race. But as he accumulated victories, his goal shifted. “I started to think more about how to be an asset to the industry” rather than his race-day wins, he said.
Innovation is key to racing as it is to aviation, he said, with teams always trying to tweak engines and other systems to gain more performance. His father introduced the innovation of using business aviation to get team members to and from races, founding Champion Air Airlines, which today specializes in sports team transport.
Earnhardt’s latest win: he’s just finished a children’s book, “Buster’s Trip to Victory Lane,” written for his two young daughters, who currently only care to read “Goodnight, Moon,” he said.
Tyson, interviewed by broadcast journalist Lisa Starke, also has a lunar fixation, evident as he addressed topics from the NASA Artemis program, the Webb Space Telescope, asteroid deflection, UFOs, and more.
Charter operator Welojets this week joined a growing list of prospective customers for Electra’s hybrid-electric eSTOL aircraft, signing a letter of intent for 32 of the model. Announcing the deal on Tuesday at NBAA-BACE, the Virginia-based startup said its provisional order book now runs to 1,000 aircraft with a combined value of $3 billion, which would imply a list price of $3 million.
Electra’s customer base spans regional airlines, urban air mobility providers, charter groups, helicopter operators, and emergency medical support providers based in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia. These include Bristow Group, Flyv, Ebird, Harbour Air, Tailwind Air, Ravn Alaska, MintAir, Events Air Cargo, Flapper, Yugo, Gold Aviation, Skyportz, Northwest Seaplanes, and the El Azufre resort.
Welojets, which operates a fleet of business aircraft in Europe and the Americas, said its interest in the eSTOL aircraft is part of a plan to develop new markets in a more sustainable way. Its employees are spread across 20 locations.
Bombardier and Signature Aviation signed a landmark multi-year agreement at NBAA-BACE 2022 on Monday that will see the airframer convert all of its flight activity to sustainable aviation fuel through the Signature Renew book-and-claim system. The deal will cover all of Bombardier’s flight operations starting on Jan. 1, 2023.
The Canadian manufacturer’s aircraft activity covers several areas, including product testing and certification flights conducted in Montreal; shuttle flights for Global family aircraft from Toronto to Montreal for completion; global customer demonstration flights from the OEM’s Hartford, Connecticut-based demonstration team; new aircraft certification flights from Bombardier’s Wichita flight-test center; and active service check flights from all of the company’s service centers worldwide. These activities account for approximately 1,000 flights annually.
“Bombardier’s decision will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from fuel use in its flight operations by approximately 25 percent,” said Jean-Christophe Gallagher, executive v-p of services, support, and corporate strategy for Bombardier.
“This is a huge gain,” he said, adding the goal of the agreement was to reduce the company’s net GHG emissions as fast as possible. By opting for the book-and-claim model, where the actual fuel is dispensed near its point of production, Bombardier negates any GHG emissions that would have been incurred through the transport of the actual SAF.
From email to streaming video, today’s business jet travelers demand the same connectivity experience in the cabin as they enjoy in their offices. The only way to meet that expectation is to use a network with the peak output capacity required to avoid data slowdowns.
NBAA’s annual Business Aviation Convention and Exposition (BACE), which has rotated locations throughout its history, is landing in Las Vegas for at least the next four years and possibly farther into the future. Chris Strong, senior v-p for events at NBAA, told AIN that the move comes as the tradeshow industry as a whole is trending toward optimizing events in a single location.
“We have a history of having shows in consistent places,” Strong noted. Many of its conferences will be held in a given year and its regional forums return to the same locations. Even BACE, which previously had many more locations to draw upon, has in its more recent history toggled between Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas.
Noting the trends of stationing at one location, “we decided with what’s going on in Las Vegas—with the new hall, ramp space—that we would do a trial to be in Las Vegas for four years,” Strong said.
This was a decision, he stressed, that was made following conversations with exhibitors, attendees, and the board of directors. The reaction to the trial has been “largely positive,” Strong said, noting the track record NBAA already has had with the Nevada city. “Vegas is international. It’s the global destination for a global show and it’s also a place where high-net-worth individuals tend to be very comfortable gathering.”
Jet Aviation, which operates 30 FBOs worldwide, is making improvements at several locations, the company announced this week at NBAA-BACE 2022. The General Dynamics subsidiary has broken ground on a new 40,000-sq-ft hangar at its Bozeman, Montana facility, which when completed in the third quarter of 2023 and will be able to accommodate ultra-long-range business jets.
At Houston William P. Hobby Airport, the company has embarked on a project that will rebuild a 30,000-sq-ft hangar, renovate 6,000 sq ft of the FBO terminal’s lobby, and upgrade 4,500 sq ft of office space. This work is expected to continue into the first quarter of next year.
And in Scottsdale, Arizona, Jet Aviation is constructing an 18,000-sq-ft hangar, which, when completed in the middle of 2023, will bring the location to 48,000 sq ft of total aircraft storage space. The facility at Scottsdale Airport opened in 2020 and last year was the winner of AIN’s Top Flight Award for best new FBO. Combined, the three improvements represent approximately $25 million in investment by Jet Aviation.
“We want to be where our customers are, and it’s evident that Scottsdale, Bozeman, and Houston are important and strategic locations on our map,” said David Best, the company’s senior v-p of regional operations and its Americas general manager.
At the No Plane, No Gain breakfast on Tuesday morning at NBAA-BACE 2022, members of Congress on the panel shared their concerns about personnel shortages and technology advances outpacing the FAA’s ability to keep pace with aviation industry developments. The FAA is due for reauthorization in September, at the end of the FAA’s fiscal year 2023, and legislators are already planning for how a funding bill can help the FAA deal with these issues.
“The challenge becomes ensuring that we have an FAA that keeps up,” said House aviation subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen (D-Washington), “and that is an important focus of the bill next year. [We’re] sending a clear signal to the FAA that Congress recognizes that the airspace is changing, users of the airspace are changing, the tools and the technologies to get in the airspace are changing, and that we would want the FAA to change along with it, to keep up with that technology.”
“Just expertise in the FAA is getting to be more and more of a problem,” added Sam Graves (R-Missouri), ranking Republican on the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee. “We’re seeing that more and more from the FAA and regulators. Obviously, a career in the private sector is much more lucrative and desirable than a career within the FAA. That’s one of the problems that we’re seeing.”
The FAA has issued a supplemental type certificate (STC) for installation of Garmin’s GI 275 electronic flight instrument in the Falcon 7X, replacing the original secondary flight display. This is the first dedicated GI 275 STC for a Part 25-certified business jet. Other Falcon model STCs are planned, as well as an approved model list STC to cover a variety of Part 25 aircraft.
According to Garmin, the upgrade could include two GI 275s—one as primary and configured as an attitude-direction indicator (ADI) with synthetic vision system information and another on the copilot’s side configured as a multifunction display.
Both GI 275s are integrated with existing systems in the 7X, including flight control, inertial navigation, air data, and flight management systems.
When configured as the ADI or primary instrument, the GI 275 can display flight path, attitude, heading, altitude, airspeed, and vertical speed, along with localizer, ILS, and VOR approach cues. The copilot’s GI 275 can display backup GPS information in case the aircraft’s GPS sensors fail.
As a multifunction display, the copilot’s GI 275 has pages with a course deviation indicator and horizontal situation indicator with or without a moving map. On the map, pilots can view terrain, obstacles, traffic, airspace, airways, SafeTaxi diagrams, and information about waypoints and points of interest.
The digital flip-through issues of AIN’s award-winning NBAA Convention News are now available online. It’s a great way to quickly scan the news from NBAA-BACE 2022, whether you’re in Orlando attending the show or watching from afar.
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