One Aviation secured European certification for its Eclipse 550 on 18 November, paving the way for deliveries of the very light jet to be delivered to commercial operators on the continent.
Europe is currently home to around 20 Eclipse 500s – the previous incarnation of the VLJ which was certificated by EASA in 2007. “We have made a number of changes to the aircraft since then,” says Ken Ross, One Aviation’s president. “So the certification needed to be updated.”
The upgraded aircraft – introduced in 2013 as the EA550 and already approved by the Federal Aviation Administration – features a dual Avio integrated flight management system, synthetic vision, enhanced vision, auto-throttles and anti-skid brakes.
Albuquerque, New Mexico-based One Aviation has two distributors for the €2.3 million ($3 million) twinjet on the continent: Guernsey-headquartered Aeris Aviation, in which Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickenson is a shareholder, and Schonhagen, Germany based JetLounge. The company also has four service centres throughout the region.
“We plan to expand both our distributor and service centre network to grow the fleet,” says Ross.
“While we have been able to deliver the EA550 to private owners until now and place the aircraft on a non-European register, we wern’t able to do that for European commercial operators,” Ross says. “We expect this sector to account for fair share of the fleet eventually.”
Source: Flight Daily News
