Danish charterer New Air, based at Billund Airport, now has a Piper Chieftain for use within the company, ferrying its staff between destinations. The Piper joined New Air’s fleet alongside a Citation I, which will be based in Dublin and available for charter.

The two-aircraft package arrived at New Air courtesy of an investor. The Citation I “Eagle” will be used by the owner, but is to be operated commercially on New Air’s AOC. Nearly 25 years old, it has relatively low hours and new paintwork and interior. It has so far flown a lot for the investor, to France, Germany and Denmark.

We talked with Kim Alpa, vice president of sales at the company, about the Chieftain: “We are not going to do any commercial charter, we will mostly use it internally in our company for crew tansportation. However, if we get a request and we have it standing doing nothing, we will sell the time on the ad-hoc market.

“No Chieftains are vip, in my opinion,” Alpa continued. “It has grey leather seats, it is ok looking. It’s functional, with new paintwork and interior, and new seat covers, but there is nothing vip about a Chieftain.”

The aircraft came from Ireland to New Air, where it was flying commercial flights for a charter company there. “The guy who used to own Ireland Airways has invested in New Air; Ireland Airways actually don’t exist any more. We took the aircraft over to the Danish register,” said Alpa.

“For this transport role, the Chieftain would not have been our number one choice. It’s very hard saying which one we would have chosen, but this is not that cheap to fly around. Maintenance-wise it is very good, but our flights are normally quite a long way from the home base. Italy, Spain, the southern part of France – it doesn’t have the range for the sort of flights we are doing, but still, it’s fulfilling its purpose.”

New Air is currently advertising on its website for flight and cabin crew, and most of all for captains. “We are always looking for staff. Stewardesses you can get no problem and co-pilots I can get no problem. Captains is always a problem, operations personnel is difficult, as are sales personnel. We have got our captains from Australia, Sweden, France, Norway, from all over,” he said.

New Air looks for a minimum of 3,000 hours flying in its captains, as well as an ATPL licence. “I think our standards are slightly above the average. We really need our captains to come with these qualifications, and we stick to this minimum.

“We have got some very weird missions. We go into Pristina every single week right now. This is a place where we need to trust our captains 100 per cent. We are not able to use a low-time pilot with no experience. There are a lot of limitations going in and out of Pristina; it is quite serious, there are still danger zones – “rocks in the sky” – so we need to trust out captains totally. We also go to places where we have reduced take-off mass to be able to perform on these fields, and therefore there is very little room for error.

“We are flying a lot of Air Force missions, on their schedules, carrying NATO and Norwegian military, K-4, plus all the big [pop] bands, car companies, oil companies, almost everything,” he said.

EBAN concluded with an inevitable question about the Danish charter market: “In Denmark there is no charter market, but our market is all of Europe,” Alpa emphasised.

“We are doing a lot of flights in and out of the UK, also domestic in the UK, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany Poland, Italy Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland.”