Air Hamburg has taken delivery of a sixth XLS+ which sales director Mike Ulka says fits perfectly with the operator's strategy: “We want to focus on three types of aircraft: the CJ, the XLS+ and the Legacy. We are trying to phase out the Bravo now. The King Air will remain because we will not get a good price for it, and we have one Phenom 300. This was a dealbreaker and we had to take that one.

“The loss of the Bravo is not about range, it is more about the accep-tance of our customers, because 95 per cent of our sales go through Avinode, and Avinode customers are very keen to get new aircraft; they like to have aircraft that are not older than five years. We feel Bravos are old-fashioned, so that is the reason behind it. You can do cabin refurbishment and all the rest, but eventually it gets to the point where it is not worth it,” Ulka says.

The operator has recently added a second CJ2 and negotiations for a seventh XLS+ are under way.