Flight Options plans to equip most of its fleet of fractionally owned business jets with Aircell’s high-speed Internet system, a decision that will give the company’s aircraft owners and jet card customers in-flight Wi-Fi access anywhere over the continental U.S.
The first installations are due to begin later this year and continue through 2011. Flight...
moreFlexjet, Bombardier Aerospace’s fractional-share program, announced a reconfigured product offering at NBAA, with an emphasis on its ability to offer supplemental lift and other aviation solutions to corporate flight departments. Though fractional programs have experienced declining revenues during the past year as owners have cut back on aircraft...
moreDespite some modest improvement last month, demand in the North American executive charter market is still relatively soft, according to the latest data from Web-based portal Avinode. On behalf of NBAA Convention News, the company tracked charter rates for three types of aircraft over the past 18 months, and the results show that, in all three cases,...
moreCharterX Wyvern has endorsed the NBAA’s recently published NBAA Best Practices for Air Charter Brokering. The NBAA’s best-practices protocols include operational guidelines and safety oversight procedures. “We applaud NBAA’s efforts to promote best practices within the air charter brokering community,” said Jim Betlyon, CEO of CharterX Wyvern (Booth No....
moreThe fractional share marketplace is changing rapidly in response to the lengthy global recession. While most fractional operators already reduced staffing levels to match lower levels of customer activity, it wasn’t until September 11 that NetJets announced layoffs of 350 nonunion employees. These were the first en masse terminations since David Sokol was...
moreThe cream has risen to the top and has not gone sour is how Comlux would characterize today’s charter market, which is to say that demand for high-end, airliner-class aircraft has held up well in relation to the marked downturn still being suffered by operators of smaller jets. This explains why the Swiss-based group has come to Orlando (Booth No. 4293)...
moreCharterMatrix (Booth No. 2791) is rolling out Airplanemanager.com, its Web-based aircraft scheduling and quoting system, here at the NBAA Convention. Terry Cooper, president of Huntington Beach, Calif.-based CharterMatrix, says the system has been used in beta test by several companies during the past year. “It’s what they use on a daily basis for all...
moreThe Private Jets division of charter broker Air Partner suffered a £2.5 million ($3.9 million) loss in its fiscal year that ended on July 31, according to the firm’s financial report that was released yesterday. Overall, the UK-based group saw profits before tax fall 57 percent to £4 million ($6.4 million) on sales that were 23 percent down at £194.3...
moreProduction delays at Embraer’s factory and an associated bottleneck in the pilot training process for its new Phenom 100 light jet have delayed the service launch of air-taxi firm JetBird. The company expected to begin revenue flights last month from its initial operating base at Cologne, Germany, but CEO Stefan Vilner said this will now happen “before the...
moreNew NetJets chairman and interim CEO David Sokol has begun making changes at NetJets Europe, appointing a new boss to run the business and implement job cuts at the division’s headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal. Eric Connor has been appointed the new CEO and chairman of NetJets Europe following the October 4 resignation of CEO William Kelly, which the company...
moreResponding to scuttlebutt about selling off its Cessna Citation X fleet, charter aircraft provider XOJet told AIN, “This is incorrect as there are no current plans to sell any Citation Xs from the XOJet fleet.” Instead, a confluence of events fueled the perception that it was disposing of its Xs, namely the fact that six Citation Xs the firm was leasing...
moreRecession raises questions about the viability of the fractional model
moreThe UK Department for Transport (DfT) has been denying flight-permit applications by U.S. charter firms to operate flights between the UK and other countries, due to a UK policy that allows the DfT to consult with the British Business and General Aviation Association (BBGA), whose members can object to the flight.The DfT’s policy for extra-bilateral...
moreFractional provider NetJets on September 11 announced the first major workforce reduction since David Sokol took over in early August as chairman and acting CEO, following the resignation of company founder Richard Santulli on August 4. Last month’s layoffs were precipitated by “severe economic conditions facing the aviation industry” and affected some 350...
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