Bristol Flying Centre has come in third for 2001, improving on last year’s tenth position.

Operations director, Martin Barnes highlights an ability to disembark passengers in a hurry to explain the positive feedback. He told EBAN: “Our major deal is trying to get passengers off the aircraft as quick as we can, and on to the street within about 30 seconds – particularly with our transatlantic visitors.

“They just want to get off the aircraft to ramp-side limo transport and a couple of guys getting the baggage into the car, so they just get out of the airport as fast as they can – they’re not interested in looking at the inside of FBOs.”

However a lack of quality hangarage facilities in the southwest of England leaves room for improvement in providing service for home-based operators: “We are being approached constantly”, he said, “by operators looking for a west country base normally for middle weight business jets or turboprops.

At the moment we are turning them away because we don’t have the facilities,” Barnes continued.

Bristol Airport has recently changed hands to an Australian/Spanish consortium and Bristol Flying Centre is in active discussions with them to build a new hangarage and FBO facility: “We are trying to invest £2 million in a new purpose-built FBO with the capacity to house about twelve corporate aircraft.

“We hope that this will futher improve our FBO rating scores in the future based on the fact that

we would be able to offer a good service to UK-based operators,” said Martin Barnes.

“We have expanded our corporate aircraft this year, taking on a couple of King Airs and a Learjet, but we still experience the problem of insufficient hangarage,” he added.