CJP wouldn’t be the strong owner/pilot association it is today without its valued Partners, with more than 70 companies exhibiting at the 2024 Convention. Four CJP Platinum Partners had the opportunity to highlight their company’s latest news in a dedicated session on the show’s opening day.
Collins Aerospace
Steve Adolphs, director of aftermarket programs for Collins Aerospace, noted the company has reached 2,000 installations of its Pro Line Fusion avionics suite. The upgrade brings synthetic vision, touchscreen displays, dual FMS and other upgrades over the Pro Line 21 flight decks now installed in approximately 5,700 aircraft – approximately 50% of Collins’ active fleet – many of which are in the Textron Aviation family.
The OEM recently introduced enhancements for both Pro Line systems, including controller-pilot datalink communications (CPDLC) and synthetic vision. Collins is also working on modernizing older models like the CJ4 and XLS+ and addressing 5G interference through altimeter upgrades.
Adolphs also cited last year’s unveiling of a Pilots Advisory Group that engages those flying with Collins equipment on the upgrades process. “Several of you have joined this and told us it’s been beneficial,” he added. “We encourage others to join as well to give us additional guidance and expertise.”
FSTAT/FlightSafety International
Brian Moore, senior vice president of Operations at FSTAT/FlightSafety International, cited much-welcomed upgrades to its Atlanta and Houston facilities, including relocation of CJ1 and CJ2+ simulators to the latter. “Our Houston facility has been there for quite a while,” he said. “I was just visiting with a long-time customer who’s trained with us for 39 years, and he said that you wouldn’t recognize it if you went back to it today. It was important to us to make it a nicer facility.”
The company also plans to have new Citation M2 and CJ3 Gen2 simulators at its Farnborough, England facility by April 2025. FlightSafety’s eLearning tool offers an online ground school option for most C525 and Citation Mustang aircraft, part of a blended recurrence option that combines online learning with in-person instruction.
Availability of training slots and qualified instructors remains tight in the post-COVID environment, but Moore cited progress in both areas over the past year. These positive developments come as the training provider looks to expand its Safe to Land℠ sim program and the launch of its Gold Standard Safety Training (GSST) initiative, derived from CJP’s own Gold Standard Safety Award (GSSA) program.
Garmin Aviation
Philip Straub, executive vice president for Garmin Aviation, noted the importance of healthy customer relationships in helping the company achieve a #1 user satisfaction ranking for the 20th consecutive year in Professional Pilot magazine’s annual survey, and best product support for the 21st consecutive year by Aviation International News.
“You are a core informed user group for our avionics,” he said. “You know them very well [and] you make us better by using them. We’re never going to be perfect but we’re going to keep driving.”
Straub also discussed the company’s new Runway Occupancy Awareness (ROA) software that will roll out in upcoming software updates to panels ranging from the G1000 NXi to G5000-equipped flight decks. ROA uses ADS-B In capability to determine your aircraft’s present position relative to mapped runway coordinates, taxiways, hold short lines and other critical airport surface areas. “It’s in the background, always running those computations to look at what might be a threat,” he added.
Tamarack Aerospace
Year-to-date sales of Tamarack Aerospace’s active winglets are already higher than in all of 2023 total, company president Jacob Klinginsmith announced. The company also recently added a new completion center, Global Aviation Tech in Wichita, KS that allows customers to have their winglets installed in conjunction with other scheduled maintenance work and upgrades.
“We offer Tamarack transformation centers around the world where we can do the upgrade in 10 days or less, including custom paint,” Klinginsmith added. “But we heard feedback from the fleet that they wanted to be able to schedule Doc 10 inspections, avionics upgrades, things like that, to have essentially zero downtime and nest those activities.”
CJP members Larry Stoddard and Jonathan Bailey noted the winglets installed on their Citations have done more than improve fuel efficiency, with observations of a smoother ride in turbulent air and quicker acceleration when leveling off at top-of-climb as well. “It really changes the aircraft,” Stoddard said. “It’s an enormous change for underpowered aircraft that have difficulty with hot and high operations.”