New research from Gama Aviation plc, reveals that 56% of the Middle East's fleet of business aircraft are classified as medium to heavy and 14% as business jet airliners. The corresponding figures for the global fleet are 30% and 0.3%. Gama Aviation’s research reveals that there are some 794 business aircraft in the Middle East, and one in five of these (161) were delivered bet...
Thomas Rueckert has become head of aircraft overhaul services at Lufthansa Technik. The 45-year-old industrial engineer has replaced Soeren Stark, who has been appointed to the Executive Board of Lufthansa Cargo as COO. In his new function Thomas Rueckert will lead the international overhaul network of Lufthansa Technik with eight sites in Europe, Asia and the Americas. "We're delig...
Ultra-modern, elegant and sleek – that is what the Scheme Designers team of artists set about to capture for the latest member of the REMOS AG family of aircraft, the GXiS, powered by the ROTAX 912iS Sport with electric fuel injection. The new REMOS GXiS promises to be powerful and state-of-the-art, while also being efficient, user friendly and safe. The GXiS is being shown at AERO Fri...
Abu Dhabi Aviation, the biggest commercial helicopter operator in the Middle East, said that it is using the softening of demand for its aviation services to diversify its lines of business, adding training and real estate investment to its portfolio of activities. “It’s not a secret that we are in a cyclical business," said Nader Al Hammadi, the chairman of Abu Dhabi Aviation....
Pratt & Whitney is rolling out software and hardware fixes this summer that will reduce PW1100G start-up delays to between 90s and 100s, down from about 3min, the company tells Flightglobal. The modifications come after some customers expressed dissatisfaction with a thermal issue that can cause the geared-turbofan engines to have much longer start-up delays than the industry standard of...
The Royal Australian Flying Doctor Service Queensland Section (RFDS Qld) will train its Beechcraft King Air pilots at a flight simulator facility on the Sunshine Coast. The Beechcraft King Air 350i flight simulator, which is convertible to a B200 full flight simulator, is a partnership between Universal Training Systems (UTS) and Ansett Aviation Training Australasia and is expected to be fully...
Airbus and Singapore Airlines have officially opened a new joint-venture pilot training centre that when fully operational will train up to 10,000 pilots a year. The Airbus Asia Training Centre, which already numbers Qantas and Virgin Australia among its 17 airline customers, began operations at a brand new 9,250sq m site at Singapore’s Seletar Aerospace Park earlier in April, and was off...
The U.S. government is poised to approve two long-delayed sales of Boeing Co fighter jets to Qatar and Kuwait, and could announce the multibillion-dollar deals during President Barack Obama's visit to the Gulf this week, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Both deals have been stalled amid concerns raised by Israel that equipment sent to Gulf states could fall into the wrong...
It now seems inevitable that a tragic accident involving a commercial plane with hundreds aboard and a drone is only a matter of time. The numbers are troubling with the British Airways encounter Sunday just the tip of the iceberg. Officials: Drone apparently slams into plane Last year, in the United Kingdom alone there was a quadrupling of near misses to 23 in the six month period from A...
It may look like a backwards airplane with a collection of fans for wings, but a miniature test version of DARPA's Vertical Take-off and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) took to the skies recently. According to the builder, Aurora Flight Sciences, the subscale vehicle demonstrator (SVD) prototype of the LightningStrike successfully completed a series of takeoff, hover, and landing man...
In another potential aerospace application for 3D printing, Boeing has filed an application with the US Patent Office for a way to make artificial "ice." The company isn't planning on making novelty ice cubes for the first class passengers (yet), but has come up with a way of printing plastic and composite shapes that can be tacked onto the wings and other surfaces to simulate icing...
The Emirates flight left Dubai this afternoon and made it as far as Turkey before diverting to Cyprus. Pilots were forced to divert a plane travelling to the UK after declaring a mid air emergency. The Emirates flight EK19 left Dubai at 2.45pm and made it as far as Turkey before diverting to Cyprus where it landed at Larnaca airport. It is understood that medics were waiting at the...
A FedEx employee who works at the company’s Memphis hub ended up in Lubbock, Texas, last Friday after he fell asleep on the job. According to KJTV-TV, the unidentified worker was loading packages on the plane when he became extremely exhausted and fell asleep. Without noticing him in the back of the airplane, the pilots departed Memphis like normal. But sometime during the flight, the wor...
Airbus has told aircraft industry experts that it expects to win 700 orders this year, industry sources said. Airbus executives mentioned the target at a meeting of aircraft value appraisers in Toulouse last week, they said. A spokesman for the European planemaker declined to comment. In its latest official guidance, parent Airbus Group AIR.PA says it expected orders to exceed deliveries...
Hong Kong International Airport saw ‘mild’ growth of 1.1 per cent in March helped by trade with India and Australasia, but the first quarter was still down 3.5 per cent on 2015. In March volumes were up by 1.1 per cent to 368,000 tonnes, with exports growing by five per cent and transhipments were up three per cent. Despite the growth in March, volumes for the first quarter are down...
Saudi Arabian flag-carrier Saudia is to establish a new airline division for low-cost air transport in the kingdom. The plan has been disclosed by the airline’s director general, Saleh bin Nasser Al-Jasser, during a ceremony in Jeddah which featured an Airbus A320neo test aircraft as a backdrop. Al-Jasser says the airline, branded Flyadeal, will begin operating in mid-2017....
EgyptAir Training Center has passed the European Agency for Safety and Aviation (EASA) inspection. EASA reviewed the training programs on offer, the quality of standards and the administrative structure of the instructors, engineers and the training centre to assess if they conformed to EASA specifications and requirements. A delegation from EASA performed the inspection, assessing...
Magnus Aviation, a UK-based private jet charter business, has reported a 32% increase in the availability of empty legs on private jets in the first three months of this year compared to the same period in 2015. It has also secured 17% more empty leg placements for clients. Magnus Aviation estimates that there were around 40,900 private jet empty legs in Europe during the first quarter of this...
Bell Helicopter, a Textron Inc. company, and Abu Dhabi Aviation, are proud to announce reaching one million hours of successfully operating of their Bell Helicopter fleet. “We have been operating Bell Helicopter aircraft since the 1976,” said Mr. Mohamed Ibrahim Al Mazrouei, general manager, Abu Dhabi Aviation. “Our Bell Helicopter fleet has grown to over 40 aircraft made...
The Luxaviation Group is today revealing elegant new cabin crew uniforms which draw inspiration from the golden era of air travel enjoyed in the 1950s. The uniforms, designed by Jana App-Sandering, Luxaviation's group client service manager, have been inspired by Dior's iconic 'New Look' hourglass silhouette, with a vintage-look reminiscent of a time when air travel was synonymo...
Another Gulfstream G650 with Russian registration started to fly. RA-10204 aircraft (6170), owned by Sberbank arrived at Sheremetyevo International Airport from Savannah in mid-March with US registration N670GA. On April 14 already made his first flight to Amsterdam and Rotterdam (The Hague Airport - EHRD). The new Gulfstream is on Premier Avia certificate and will be used...
