Mountain Lion Aviation, based at Truckee Tahoe airport, has taken delivery of a Pilatus PC-12. The Swiss-manufactured aircraft joins several Cirrus aircraft at Mountain Lion, as well as a TBM. “The response to it has been great – it has been a really popular selection with our clientele,” explains chief communications officer William Apotheker. “A lot of people knew about the Pilatus; I was notified that it was coming in the first month of the year, and the response even before we were able to start chartering it was great. People were familiar with the plane and were looking forward to it, and we have had great success with booking it.

“Our chairman and founder moved back to Texas, where he’s from, and he brought our TBM down there, and now we are looking at expanding to the Dallas and Fort Worth area too with the TBM and the Cirrus.”

The TBM didn’t have a bathroom on board, which is one of the advantages of the PC-12. “Up to now we have been a little restricted with the lengths of flights we could do and where we could fly to,” Apotheker continues. “We’ve expanded our reach and, most importantly for us, our key market so far has been the Bay Area, those who come up to Truckee and Tahoe and who have second homes. We could use the Cirrus for that, because they already had all their belongings in Tahoe, they didn’t have to bring a bunch of stuff with them. Now that we have the Pilatus and there is more space on board, we are able to reach new clients who are just coming up to Tahoe once a year, as opposed to once a month. So we can expand our clientele with the Pilatus; it will really start to open up some new opportunities for us.”