Lions Air’s fractional ownership scheme SkyAir will have doubled its Pilatus fleet by early next year. Two new PC-12 aircraft have recently arrived at the Swiss operator, and two more will arrive in January and February 2002.

Jurg Fleischmann of Lions Air and SkyAir said that the Time Jet fractional programme had signed 20 customers and owed its success to the qualities of its chosen aircraft.

Most of the clients are businesses, and only one quarter of clients are private individuals, Fleischmann told EBAN. We asked him if it would not be advantageous to operate a variety of aircraft and offer customers a choice of corporate shuttles: “At the moment we are really happy and we are focusing on the PC-12. The advantages of the aircraft lie in flying in and out of grass strips – plus it is a fast business aeroplane with shortfield performance. All of our customers fly out of small airfields and into small airfields. They all try to avoid the big airports.”

As reported and pictured in April 2001’s EBAN, one of the the original PC-12s is painted with a distinctive sunflower scheme:

“We have had a lot of response about this painting, and we are planning to paint one more PC-12 in a really extraordinary way, with a lion on the aeroplane. We hope to bring that out at the end of the year, and that will be a really special aeroplane. Just right now we are dealing with an airbrusher – he has made some proposals, and we will paint the aeroplane most probably in November, or when we take one of the new aircraft,” Fleischmann reported.

European charterers can take heart that an operator is carving out a stake of the fractional market dominated by imported US programmes. Fleischmann modestly attributes this success to the Pilatus aircraft: “I don’t think that we would have had the same success if we had started a fractional ownership programme with Citations and Hawkers. We have a completely different field of customers than for example NetJet or Flexjet have. I think the success we have is because of the new aircraft type.”

The new aircraft will keep the same six seat executive interior as the four current PC-12s, including the possibility to add two more seats in the back.

“About 20 per cent of our flights are with the eight seats and the remaining 80 per cent are with the six seat configuration,” he informed us.

Fleischmann himself is a pilot, and recently was involved in a seven week mission for Swiss national television. “We flew from northern Norway down to Sicily, and the television crew produced seven shows along the 15th meridian, concentrating on the landscape and the people that live along the meridian. That was produced out of one of our PC-12s. Cameras were mounted on the aircraft by the TV people.