Italian company Eurofly Service has recently acquired a Challenger 601 from Gretair.

General manager Alberto Nathansohn said: “We had a management customer who previously operated a Citation aircraft and he decided to replace the Cessna with the Challenger, without replacing the operator.

So in a sense, we more or less inherited the aircraft.”

He continued: “We have been working with and managing Gretair’s aircraft for several years now. We have had a long professional relationship with them and so far it has been very successful.”

Eurofly Service has had the aircraft for some time now, but despite its popularity with the company’s charter customers, there is a limit to the amount of charter work the Challenger can do.

“The owner has been using it extensively and we have not been able to use it very much with our regular charter customers,” he said. “We did use it for a few dozen hours this year for charter operations, but the customer has used it for several hundred hours this year. I expect this to stay more or less the same, I don’t anticipate that their need for travel will change dramatically any time in the near future.

“Even though we are unable to charter the aircraft very often, the contract is still very profitable for us,” explained Nathansohn. “We earn the management fee anyway and more from anything that has to be done maintenance-wise.

“We earn a bit of extra money on the few charter hours that we are able to do as well. All in all, I think

it is a good proposition for us, because in any event it complements our service which mainly focuses

on wide-cabin aircraft,” he said.

“The Challenger fits in very well alongside the Falcon jets that we operate for charter.”

The company has flown only European missions so far, with no intercontinental travel at all. Nathansohn explained that destinations further afield could easily be reached, but that it depended entirely on customer demand.

“We mainly have wide-cabin aircraft in our fleet already. We have two Falcon 900s, three Falcon 2000s, plus a number of smaller aircraft; two Falcon 50s and three Falcon 20s,” he said.

“We also have a few Learjets and Beechcraft. The Challenger fits in well with the larger sized aircraft in the Falcon family.

“Out of the total of 15 aircraft we have in our fleet, we own six and we manage nine.”

According to Nathansohn, the company is considering adding a fourth Falcon 2000 to the fleet. “Having similar aircraft is very important, because of the synergies you can create with the crews and the maintenance,” he explained.

“The Falcon 2000 would fit in because of that and also, because we are experiencing a significant growth in the demand for larger cabin aircraft and we think that for flights within Europe the Falcon 2000 is

a great aircraft.

“It’s also well accepted by the majority of our customers – there has been a lot of enthusiasm over it,” he maintained.

“I am finding that within the European charter market there is, as I have said, an increase in demand for larger aircraft, but the medium and small cabin aircraft market seems to be quite stagnant. I think that compared to last year and the year before that, it may even be declining.” He concluded: “This seems to be a general trend.”