Aircraft for work
that has to happen

How the flying actually works

What a rotation actually involves

FIFO rotations, government tasking and essential services are not a run of charters with a discount on the end. What you are buying is an aircraft held against a programme, crew kept current on the route, and a maintenance plan built around your schedule rather than ours.

What follows is what that actually involves, so you can compare us properly against whoever else you are talking to.

Strips, not just airports

Most resource-sector and government work does not finish at a certified aerodrome. It finishes at an ALA. The King Air B200 is on line for exactly that reason — pressurised, twin PT6A-42, and able to work off gravel and compacted earth that a jet cannot touch.

What decides whether we can take your strip:

• Length, at the weight we need to carry
• Surface and width
• Obstacle clearance on both approaches
• Whether it stays useable after rain

Send us the strip and we will assess it. If it is marginal you will hear that from us before the contract, not from a crew on the day.

Why a B200 rather than the alternatives

Against the alternatives, a piston twin is unpressurised and slower, and a jet cannot use the strip at all. What the B200 brings:

• Pressurised — climbs over weather rather than picking through it, which is the difference between a rotation that runs and one that gets cancelled
• Air-conditioned — matters more than people expect at a Queensland site in February
• Nose and aft baggage — crew-change bags do not have to come out of the cabin

Turboprop on an unsealed strip — length at weight, surface and obstacle clearance decide whether we can take it.

Payload against sector length

The trade is always fuel against seats, and nine seats with full tanks is rarely the same flight.

• A long sector into a strip with no refuelling means carrying the return fuel, and that comes straight out of payload
• Short multi-leg days with fuel available en route let you fill the cabin

Give us the sectors and the passenger numbers and we will tell you which of those you are in, before you build a schedule around the wrong one.

Crew, duty, and what actually breaks a schedule

Flight and duty limits are what people forget when a rotation gets designed in a spreadsheet. An early departure into a remote strip, a day of waiting on the ground, and a late return can run past a duty period even when the flying hours look modest.

We check a proposed schedule against duty before we quote it, and we will tell you where it needs a second crew, a night away, or simply a different departure time.

When an aircraft goes unserviceable

Across a multi-year programme it will happen. What matters is what sits behind it.

We maintain the fleet through CAR 30 and CASR Part 145 approved organisations, depending on the aircraft, on an elected system of maintenance scheduled around your programme rather than dropped into the middle of it. We run three type families out of our own 2,500 square metre hangar at Archerfield, so cover is arranged rather than improvised.

Audit and approvals

Resource-sector clients generally require an aviation risk standard audit before carriage, and government tasking carries its own approvals on top. Every flight we run is conducted under a CASA air operator’s certificate.

We put the certificate, certificates of currency and our maintenance organisation’s details in with the tender rather than after it. If your procurement team works from a template, send it through — we would rather complete your form than hand you ours.

Next step

Start with the shape of the job

A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether this is workable. If it is, we put the detail together from there.