Executive AirShare touts Embraer jet service at Jabara

Pilots and travelers arriving at Jabara may have noticed there’s a new Embraer Service Center at the northeast Wichita executive airport.

Executive AirShare, which has held the service designation for more than five years, is promoting the service center locally since moving earlier this month to 27,000 square feet of new hangars and a 7,000-square-foot office at Jabara.

It was previously operating from an aging facility at Wichita Eisenhower National Airport that was 6,000 square feet smaller.

The newer and larger facility was one reason why the aircraft fractional ownership company recently began touting its service center for the Brazilian competitor to Textron Aviation’s Citation jets.

“ICT (Eisenhower) wasn’t as robust as Jabara,” said Harry Mitchel, Executive AirShare’s chief operating officer. “As we moved into this facility, we wanted to do this right.”

Promoting the service center also reflects a decision to make it available to Embraer owners outside of Executive AirShare, the company said.

The Lenexa-based company’s Wichita center — it also operates one at its main facility at Wheeler Airport in downtown Kansas City, Mo. — is one of 20 authorized service centers in the U.S. that can support full service maintenance on Embraer’s Phenom 100 and 300 light jets.

“We have the tooling to do all the airframe work,” he said.

Embraer North America spokeswoman Alyssa Ten Eyck said there are 426 Phenom 100s and 300s operated by 268 customers in North America.

While the company will do outside Embraer work, “Our aircraft comes first and foremost,” Mitchel said.

Twenty-two of the 32 aircraft in Executive AirShare’s fractional fleet are Phenom 100s and 300s.

He said most of the Embraer work it has done for non-Executive AirShare Phenom jets has been line maintenance, or quick repair situations such as replacing a part.

“Most of the work we do third-party is AOG (aircraft on ground), something we can try and help them out with,” Mitchel said. “And we’ll drive to certain locations, airports as far as 200 miles away, if we have the bandwidth to do that.”

Because Embraer makes up most of Executive AirShare’s business jet fleet, Mitchel said the company decided to seek the service center designation as a source of revenue.

“We can provide the warranty work on our aircraft,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to reimburse our labor through Embraer. That helps us dramatically.”

This story was originally published January 18, 2017 at 7:14 AM with the headline "Executive AirShare touts Embraer jet service at Jabara."