Air Hamburg has taken delivery of a Legacy 650 as it continues to expand the fleet numbers of its most popular types – Legacy, XLS and CJ. “It is a quick growth, but we have seen with the XLS sector that you need at least three aircraft of the same type in order to reduce the ferry legs and be really productive and competitive in pricing,” says director of sales and marketing Mike Ulka. “So far we have been selling the first Legacy on Avinode, and the third and the fourth will be on Avinode as well. The other one is with a different sales agency on the Russian market.”

The operator's current fleet is three Legacys, six XLS+, one Phenom 300, two CJ3s, two CJ2s, two Bravos, one CitationJet and one King Air.

Ulka is not anticipating growth in the fleets of the Phenom, Bravo or King Air: “The Phenom 300 is a nice aircraft but we just want to focus on three types. We never sell a tail number, we just sell an XLS+. So this is why it is very important to us to have as much of one type as possible.

“We even sell the 650 as a 600. We have built up the market for the 600 and can have the additional range of 1,000 km. If we have a critical flight related to maximum range, then we can see where our 650 is and take it. But if it is in Japan, and we have a flight from Scotland to New York, we will not come back from Japan for that.”

He feels that the extended range of the 650 is its key advantage over the 600. There are some other small differences for the pilots, including the ability to fly at a higher speed of 320kts instead of 250kts below FL100. On final approach it is also possible to fly 160kts fully configured instead of 145kts.

The company's fourth Legacy is due to be collected from Brazil in May.