The new Citation Excel on Augusta Air’s AOC is one of only a handful available for charter in Germany

at the moment.

It was chosen partly because of its speed, comfort and stand-up cabin but also because it is at the top end of aircraft able to fly into the company’s base at Augsburg Airport.

Augusta md Peter Bayer says he’s delighted with this latest managed aircraft addition. He told EBAN: “We’ve been operating the aircraft for three months now and the response has been very good.

“We have some very famous customers, including Andrea Bochelli, Mick Jagger, Pete Townsend and Bayern Munich football club manager Uli Hoenes.”

Although the aircraft is based in Augsburg, Augusta has no clients for the Excel there. The owner has homes in France and Moscow and has already used the aircraft to visit a host of destinations in Europe.

The aircraft for which Augusta does have clients at its home base are a Citation Bravo and a Beech 350. However, Bayer says they’re not as busy as their stablemate.

He said: “Augsburg is not as economically strong an area as where the Excel’s charter clients live. Those aircraft are probably doing only 50 per cent of the business of the Excel at the moment.”

Indeed, said Bayer, the German economic situation is very bad at the moment. “As a former economics student and from what I observe in the media, the situation is unlikely to get any better over the next one to two years,” he said. “We simply have too many problems.”

One of those problems continues to be the social and economic integration of the former East Germany into the former West Germany and another hurdle surrounds the much-debated euro.

Bayer explained: “Our adoption of the euro has made it all the more expensive. When you buy goods here now, what used to cost 1 DM two years ago now costs 1 euro.

“But we haven’t experienced the increases in salary to match this inflation, so people can’t afford

to spend.”

As a result, says Bayer, companies who used to spend money on corporate travel are now using scheduled flights to reduce costs.

However, with regard to the Excel, 70 per cent of the company’s clients are foreign so this doesn’t affect its business particularly.