While Textron Aviation’s Beechcraft King Air utility aircraft is well-suited for air ambulance and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, operators have told Aviation Fabricators (AvFab) that the aircraft’s seats could be better tailored to those use cases.
“The King Air is the world’s most-adaptable airframe, equally at home as an ISR workhorse as it is as the backbone of global air ambulance fleets,” Hayden Lowe, AvFab’s vice-president, said at the NBAA show on 14 October. ”If you need to pick up a sick patient in a remote village in Alaska, the King Air gets it done. If you need to perform surveillance on terrorist cells in the Middle East, the King Air gets it done.”
Less reliable are deliveries of the King Air’s seats and support for the turboprop’s in-service seats, according to AvFab’s market research.
“We were told that the seats in the market today are very expensive, with lead times often exceeding nine months and parts support that is essentially non-existent,” Lowe says. “Many [operators] will try to retrofit executive seats to fit special missions roles, sacrificing comfort, durability and even effectiveness.”
Enter a pair of forthcoming products: AvFab’s Guardian and Responder seats.
The Guardian seat, marketed toward ISR operators, features a five-point harness and the ability to recline and adjust height.
The Responder, meanwhile, is aimed at air ambulance markets, coming equipped with a four-point harness and the additional ability to swivel “so attendants can rotate toward the patient when actively administering care”, Lowe says.
Missouri-based AvFab claims that it will be able to deliver its products in five weeks, with parts support not exceeding a one-week turnaround. Further, the company says its seats will be 40% less-expensive than on-the-market options.
AvFab is partnering with Oregon Aero, which will provide seat foam, to produce the forthcoming King Air seats.
The firm says it has secured 15 orders prior to achieving Federal Aviation Administration approval for Guardian and Responder, with the first two seats bound for Textron Aviation Special Missions.
Lowe adds that AvFab will also deliver the products to a “major medevac operator in the UK, as well as law enforcement” in the USA.
FAA approval of Guardian and Responder has been delayed by the US federal government shutdown, potentially endangering AvFab’s first promised delivery date on 17 November.
“We submitted for approval on 9 September and received feedback from the FAA, but have not heard back since the shutdown on 3 October,” Lowe says, adding that AvFab is near the end of an 18-month certification process.
Looking ahead, AvFab is targeting future seats tailored to other Textron Aviation platforms, including the Cessna SkyCourier and the Cessna Grand Caravan.
