Osprey Holdings, the parent company of Leeds-based Executive Air Limited, expects to double in size within the next 12 months, after purchasing a brand new King Air six months ago. Chief pilot Peter Derbyshire told EBAN: “We chose this particular aircraft due to the range the company required. A great deal of the work we do at the moment for the parent company requires flying the owner (Geoff Mountain) and his team round Europe to places with fairly short airfields.

“The King Air is ideal for this because it can carry eight passengers and still deal with an 800 metre landing strip.

“At the time we also look at the CJ2, but the problem was that it couldn’t land on the shorter strips and only carried a maximum of six passengers.”

The King Air is being operated on Lincolnshire-based Eastern Air’s AOC. “Ultimately we may get our own AOC, but at the moment I don’t see the point. Having had to spend three to four months a year dealing with the CAA in the past, it just doesn’t seem worth it.”

This King Air was an entry-level aircraft for Mountain. “The first trip I did for the owner, before I was employed by him, was a business trip to a place in East Germany. The business was completed in a day, but if he had travelled by scheduled aircraft it would have taken three days to do the same job. According to Mr Mountain, it’s this freeing up of time which is enabling the company to expand so rapidly,” said Derbyshire.

Mountain has a group of companies based in Yorkshire under the umbrella of Osprey Holdings, which the aircraft facilitates by flying engineers and other personnel around.

It will now also be offered out for charter when it’s not doing company work, which the company says is allowing other Bradford-based companies to expand. “Speed wasn’t such an important consideration for us, because our passengers would rather spend an extra 45 minutes in the aircraft than have to get in a car and drive for two hours after arriving at an airfield long enough.”