VR Headsets for Flight Training and Starlink installs across Gulfstream Fleet

Jessie Naor (00:00)

All right, good morning and welcome to the VIP seat. Today is November 7th. And in today's top stories in private aviation, we're talking about how virtual reality tech is changing the training industry and how some industry insiders are warning of a private jet bubble. I'm your host today, Jessie Naor and I'm here with our co-host, Matt Thurber. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Thurber (00:19)

Thanks, Jesse. Glad to be here.

Jessie Naor (00:22)

So glad to have you. Alright, folks, sit back, buckle up, and let's take off.

Alright, so just to update everyone, we've covered a lot of topics in the few shows that we've done so far. But we have progress already from some of this. For one, the FAA has rolled back the decision to take away meteorologists in control centers. And as Matt has highlighted in a fantastic article the last week, the moss interpretation, which was a maintenance conundrum, has been rolled back as well.

So Matt, I know you've been covering that and you also had some really cool news too on the fuel side.

Matt Thurber (01:08)

Yeah, it seems like things are finally starting to move a little faster where the government's involved. And it's great that the Moss interpretation was rescinded because an FAA lawyer took it upon themselves to try to redefine what the term in-person means when maintenance is being overseen by an experienced mechanic.

working with like an apprentice or a new mechanic. And according to this lawyer, basically that means you have to be staring over the shoulder 100 % of the time at the person so you can grab their hands or whatever to stop them from doing something. And that's not at all the intent of the regulations. And it would have just made the maintenance industry

costs would have just skyrocketed. Plus there's not enough people to be able to do that. It just would have been impossible. that's good news.

Jessie Naor (02:08)

Yeah, I think our big concern was the apprenticeship programs. How do people train and learn if someone has to be over them all the time? It's not really conducive to that kind of program.

Matt Thurber (02:14)

Exactly.

Absolutely not. it'd it very difficult to attract new people into the industry and get them trained up and to use the FAA's own process that allows mechanics to learn on the job to qualify to take the tests instead of going to school. So it just was counterproductive. fortunately, the FAA listened and decided to put that one on hold.

Probably I'm going to expect there's just it's going to disappear.

Jessie Naor (02:49)

Yeah, no, very good. Well, and so where were you last week as well? You were mentioning the pre-show, something cool.

Matt Thurber (02:56)

So by pure luck, I happened to be in Northern California over the weekend. And on Saturday at Reed Hillview Airport, the airport became the first one to implement GAMI's G100UL high octane unleaded aviation gasoline. And this is significant because it's

just a little over five years before the 2030 deadline that we've set with the industry to transition to unleaded avgas. Now, GAMI is not the only player in this market. There's a similar unleaded 100 octane coming from Swift fuels. And I've been told it's coming pretty soon to some other Northern California airports. We'll see,

significant about the GAMI fuel is that it's FAA approved in every spark ignition piston aircraft engine out there, including helicopter engines, by the way. It's also approved for all airplanes, but not at the present time helicopter airframes.

So that's something that they're working on. But this means if you buy the supplemental type certificate for the fuel, you can run it in your airplane. And it has significant maintenance benefits because you're no longer getting the lead deposits from the leaded avgas. And spark plugs run cleaner. Oil stays cleaner longer.

GAMI even thinks that we'll be able to extend TBOs on our engines using unleaded fuel. So it's all good news. And if you're near Reed Hillview and you get the STC, they've started out with 7,500 gallons, but they're expecting it to be available continuously at that airport, which

about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago, shut down all leaded fuel sales.

Jessie Naor (04:56)

So that's the only option there now, but it's good. I mean, this is huge progress because this has been in debate for many, years now. And to get some people using it means that, you know, hopefully mass adoption and saying, okay, it's okay. This is actually a good thing. Nothing to stress about.

Matt Thurber (05:11)

Absolutely, and for California airports that are under a lot of pressure to get rid of leaded fuels, this finally brings them opportunity to do just that.

Jessie Naor (05:22)

Well, speaking of government pressure, the United States, Britain, the UK, has recently started to go after private jets again. This is not really new. It seems like the trend du jour the last couple of years in Europe especially hasn't hit in the US as much. But the new government that's been placed there is now going to increase taxes on private jet travel.

There's a lot of other things in this measure. It's probably one of the biggest budgets ever presented in the UK before. And the plan is, because the UK is not doing well in terms of gross domestic product and growth, you know, they're going after the pockets of the wealthy to make up for the difference. So I don't know, what are you hearing on this? Just a status quo for UK these days.

Matt Thurber (06:08)

Well, it's kind of a status quo from one standpoint. So to put it in perspective, the UK revises these fees on an annual basis. So it's not a surprise that the fees are getting revised again. What is a surprise is that they're being raised so much and that they really seem to be targeting business aviation even more.

So it's kind of par for the course for Europe to figure out ways to charge business and general aviation operators for just the basic use of their products. And it's no real big surprise. I mean, this, after all, is the part of the world where you have to pay for every single landing.

You have to pay to fly an instrument approach, which to me is crazy because you're incentivizing pilots to say, well, no, I'm going to scud run and not fly the approach because I don't want to pay an extra $50 or whatever it is.

Jessie Naor (07:09)

right. point, too. I this is, we always go to private jets, you know, but is that I haven't read into it too deeply, but does it even include kind of the smaller recreational stuff as well as the private jets of the wealthy? I'm not sure.

Matt Thurber (07:23)

Yeah, I don't believe it applies to the smaller aircraft. They've got their own set of fees to deal with. But, you know, I think it's just the way I look at it is governments continually look at private jet owners and operators as bottomless pits of money. And my fear is that if we keep adding costs to operating these these aircraft,

Jessie Naor (07:27)

Okay.

Matt Thurber (07:46)

Eventually, even the richest people are going to say, well, by golly, I'm just sick of this. You're just trying to kill me with the costs here. They're costly enough to operate with all the supply chain problems we have and all this stuff. Cost of operation has just skyrocketed. And this just adds to the burden that's going to make it less attractive.

Jessie Naor (08:07)

Yeah, well, and the duties they're planning on increasing by 50%, which is massive. You know, and there's a quote, though, from the team that put this together, and she's saying it amounted to an additional 450 pounds per passenger for a flight. You think, maybe that doesn't sound like a lot when you're spending tens of thousands of dollars, but these things do add up. And again, this is kind of the first salvo, like what's coming down the pike next, you know, in terms of...

taxes on the aircraft or fuel. There's so much being piled on top of them right now and don't seem to be letting up, that's for sure.

Matt Thurber (08:42)

It's like the excessive fees we get here, like when there's a Grand Prix or something in Las Vegas, and it costs you tens of thousands of dollars just to go to the FBO. That's unusual in places like Europe. That's kind of par for the course.

Jessie Naor (08:57)

And that's like, this could be like a whole nother topic one day, but I know someone was just posting on about that last week on LinkedIn, like how much are the fees gonna be for the Super Bowl this year? The Grand Prix is one that they're worried about, or F1 race. But I mean, that's an insane part of the industry that not only the costs are high, but those things are also traded. I know people that will go in, buy up bunch of slots at those FBOs.

And then when the time comes that someone needs them, like, I got one for you, but it's going to cost you a little bit more. You know, like this like black market of FBO fees. I don't even know how that happens, but it's pretty wild.

Matt Thurber (09:30)

Yeah, it's kind of getting out of hand. There's a lot of money in the FBO business, a lot of companies rolling up big FBO chains, and I guess their costs are high and they've got to pay for them. it's not like the old days where they used to invite everybody to fly into the FBOs for the Super Bowl, and they'd have a big party in the hangar and catered food for all the pilots.

And as far as I know back then, they weren't charging thousands of dollars just to perk.

Jessie Naor (09:58)

Well, I think too, post-COVID, we saw such an increase in the industry. And actually that kind of leads into our next story too, because that world is not the same anymore. We went through this huge post-COVID boom in sales and a lack of aircraft supply. And AirX CEO, John Matthews, he has a ton of followers on LinkedIn. He posted an article a few days ago saying that he's concerned there could be a bubble coming or that we're getting close to a potential burst.

And the methodology, I didn't have a lot of sources. There was a lot of charts in the article. I'll post a link to it here in the show notes. But his concern is when you're looking at global inventory right now, we're getting back to 2008 levels potentially. We're kind of right at the beginning of that. I don't know how much I believe this to be true. I can see some of the arguments. And I do know that the market is certainly softer than it was.

But I don't know, what are you hearing? Are people concerned?

Matt Thurber (10:51)

Yeah, you know, there's still a lot of optimism in the market looking at these charts. There's a lot of people who think that it's not something to worry about just yet. But the trend certainly, I think it is cause for worry. But one thing we have to take into account is that there was such a lack of aircraft when demand

rose suddenly during COVID that a lot of older airplanes that we expected to head to the scrap heap got pulled back into the market. And I don't think we've seen what is going to happen to those aircraft yet. The costs of operating them are fairly high. And it could be that those buyers

Having been introduced to business aviation are just going to say, OK, well, it's just worth it to buy a new aircraft and not have all those problems and have a more reliable modern product. And a lot of these older airplanes are going to end up on the market or, again, might be scrapped. Or they'll just exit the market altogether and say, yeah, it was fun while I tried it, but.

I didn't really like it. But so far indications are, from what we hear, that a lot of these new entrants do like business aviation. And once exposed to it, they really want to figure out how to participate. Maybe that means they're going to sell their aircraft and buy a fractional share or just use charter. I think it's still.

we're still working through that. We'll have to see where it goes.

Jessie Naor (12:19)

Yeah, and I'm really curious to see now that the election is over. I think a lot of people have been kind of waiting with bated breath to see what's going to happen. But now that that's happened, I really want to see where we end up at the end of this year, because that's usually the buying frenzy. know, everyone goes nuts and goes, I got a depreciation problem. I need to go ahead and buy. And with Republicans generally favoring depreciation laws, I would imagine there's going to be some new bonus depreciation potentially.

happening. The question is how quickly, you know, and if it's not going to happen at the end of this year and it gets pushed into next year, that's going to affect buyers at the end of this year. We may not have the frenzy because they're just going to push into next year when they think taxes would be more favorable to them. But yeah, I don't know. Here it's just it's a weird time. And again, how much of that is politically influenced? How much of it is we've come off the sugar high of the COVID and it's back to normal?

When I was looking at one of his charts too, I think it's important to note, you know, one of the premises is, we're getting close to 2008 levels. But in the chart, it shows May of 2008 as being at the same point that we are today in terms of how much inventory is out there, 2000 aircraft, approximately. Now, May of 2008, we hadn't had the crash yet. So when you look at this chart and you say, September of 2008, boom, you know, there's this just massive off-selling and unloading of aircraft.

Matt Thurber (13:35)

Yeah.

Jessie Naor (13:44)

I don't think that we're gonna get there. I'm sure maybe the market's not as good as it was, but I don't see this massive spike coming unless, of course, we have some terrible economic impact that happens to us.

Matt Thurber (13:57)

Yeah, well, an election being over, I think, injects some confidence into the marketplace. So if there's money out there, I can see it being deployed in business aviation.

Jessie Naor (14:09)

Yeah, and I will say anecdotally, I'm not going to say which staffer it was, but I was on the Hill last year doing some advocacy for aviation safety, and one of the staffers for a Republican senator basically said in so many words, like, we support this industry. We think a lot of the stuff that's been said about the industry is really negative and salacious and not really worth our time. So I do think, regardless of what people's political positions are out there,

at least for the.. our industry, think Republicans will probably put some positives in place for us, for manufacturers, for fuel, on all sorts of things. So, positive news, even if anyone out there is disappointed. I know I won't get into it, or what anyone's feelings are, are your feelings, and you can have them.

Matt Thurber (14:55)

Yeah.

This is a politics-free zone.

Jessie Naor (14:59)

It's a politics free zone, we don't talk about that. I tell people you have to go to my Instagram if you want the politics. If you're on LinkedIn or the podcast, no, we keep it safe for work. But I do wonder too, this kind of ties into, we were talking about how OEMs haven't really shown up to the trade shows this year. How much of this potential lull in sales too could be just cost saving measures? But I heard...

I mean, the show is substantially smaller this year. Someone told me 14 aircraft at static.

Matt Thurber (15:28)

think it was little more than that. But I think the show itself was smaller. The exhibit hall, it was fairly packed, but it just wasn't as large as it has been in the past. But yeah, some of the OEMs decided not to participate, although I just saw the news that Gulfstream's going to exhibit at the Bahrain Air Show. So we're seeing kind of a

I think a reaction to just the tremendous cost of exhibiting at big shows. And some companies are seeing more value in smaller, more intimate events. But also, attribute it a little bit to most OEMs have a fairly good backlog right now. And they're busy. And if they're selling aircraft, it's pretty far into the future.

they're not really looking for these shows to be sales opportunities, at least the bigger shows, the smaller shows that might be more what their strategy is, that they can actually meet with the buyers. The show still has a lot of value, though. A lot of people get a lot out of it.

Jessie Naor (16:17)

Yeah.

Yeah, well.

mean, it's one of the only times a year you can see everybody in one place and get a lot done.

Matt Thurber (16:39)

Exactly, exactly.

Jessie Naor (16:41)

All right, so in other news, Gulfstream has now moved to be the first OEM who's actually gonna be installing Starlink themselves. This is news on top of a bunch of news in the connectivity part of the industry.

Matt Thurber (16:43)

Okay.

Jessie Naor (16:55)

Just a little shout out to Corporate Jet Investor. I'm actually gonna be moderating a panel next week in Miami with Viasat and GoGo talking about this specific issue and what changes are happening. But this is interesting. Gulfstream has said that it has gotten requests from a lot of operators. They love Starlink. They want it on the planes. And Gulfstream wants to be able to install it themselves now and not send people out to third parties to do that. But this.

Starlink seems to have some serious movement in this industry and I think the legacy players are starting to have a really hard time competing.

Matt Thurber (17:28)

It's Starlink has taken off really quickly in business aviation. I think part of it is that the owner of the aircraft is going to talk to the pilot and say, listen, I have Starlink at home. Why can't I have it on my airplane? And then SpaceX realized that there's a market here, obviously, because Elon Musk installed Starlink on his G650.

jumped right in to, they came to NBAA, I think it was two years ago, and boy, their booth was just crowded. Yeah.

Jessie Naor (17:54)

Mm-hmm.

And it was so tiny. It was the smallest little booth. It's so funny. You you look at like, you know, any other big competitor there, they've got these giant, you know, signs and lights and Starlink comes there with like a couple like pieces on a table and everyone's like on top of them.

Matt Thurber (18:05)

Good night.

Exactly. But the interesting thing is with Gulfstream, they kind of like to do things in-house. And while there are STCs to install Starlink on Gulfstreams that have been developed by companies that are doing STCs for Starlink, Gulfstream actually sent out a memo

maintenance operations letters saying that they didn't support those SDCs. And now, Gulfstream has completed its own supplemental type certificate to install Starlink. And it's going to do it for pretty much all of its models. So you can get it done at a Gulfstream service center with the Gulfstream STC which

If you like working with a factory, it's going to be a better support mechanism for you.

Jessie Naor (19:03)

Yeah, and too I think this would be key competitively because if Starlink becomes the de facto connectivity system that gets installed on Gulfstream aircraft, that puts even more pressures on the other. know, a lot of owners, they kind of go with whatever, you know, the factory recommends. What system should we have? And if Gulfstream's moving towards that, that'd be tough for the others.

Matt Thurber (19:26)

Yeah, what I kind of expect to see at that level, buyers are going to opt for probably a dual system. They might have a Viasat, KU, or KA band system, and then get the Starlink. And that way, they're pretty much guaranteed if one's not working, the other one will be. they'll get Starlink. You get

coverage over the polar areas, which Viasat is working on, but it's not quite there yet. They've got the satellites up there, and it's coming probably in a year or so. connectivity is all about staying connected, and people want to make sure they are connected and don't lose that. And then there's obviously other options as well.

Jessie Naor (20:08)

Yeah.

Matt Thurber (20:11)

GoGo's Galileo is supposed to turn on by the end of this year. And that'll be a fairly strong competitor in the low Earth orbit market for Starlink.

Jessie Naor (20:21)

Yeah, and that's something I really, we're going to be digging in on the panel next week about this because, you you look at Starlink, they have a constellation of over 4,000 satellites at this point. I mean, they're literally covering the globe with a lot. And OneWeb, which is the supplier that Gogo is using, I mean, they're in like the 150 range, something like that right now. They're adding more, you know, the intent is to add more. And that was one of my questions was, okay, I mean, how can you possibly compete in terms of bandwidth and speed and availability, all these other things with such a

Matt Thurber (20:27)

.

Jessie Naor (20:50)

a difference in constellations. And one of the arguments I'm hearing though is that, okay, well, Starlink, they're trying to service everyone, right? You they're trying to blanket the entire earth, you know, people on the ground, people in the air, they want to serve everyone versus the OneWeb, the Vias ats and others who are really more targeted on, you know, specific commercial clients like business aviation, like the military. So they're saying we can offer the same kind of service, but we're actually focused on your industry and we're not just trying to be

know, everybody's telecom provider.

Matt Thurber (21:21)

Yeah, I think that could make a difference. I haven't seen anything that indicates that one web can't handle the traffic.

Jessie Naor (21:29)

Yeah, same here. But we'll see. I do know also Starlink announced that they're looking to get to gigabit speeds next year. So if they reach those goals, I mean, they may again blaze past everyone, which is just, it's just amazing to see how they've done it. I mean, we went from like two years ago, people saying, they can't engineer electronically steered antennas on these aircraft. And then like, boom, like six months, it was like, yeah, we have it. Here you go. Like, okay. Amazing.

Matt Thurber (21:56)

Things are moving fast in this space.

Jessie Naor (21:56)

Good.

They are and in others. So something that was announced at NBAA BACE last week or a couple of weeks ago, Cessna is announcing that it's rolling out the Garmin Autoland system on a lot of its aircraft, the CJ-4, CJ-2, M2s, all the aircraft that are equipped with the Garmin 3000. And I just I think this technology is amazing, especially for single pilot operations. You know, not that I ever recommend single pilot operations. I don't think you should.

But at least you should have the Garmin Autoland system if you're going to. But it's cool to see this really expanding, because originally it was kind of for the private owner, the TBMs, the Cirrus owners to have if they were incapacitated and had a passenger with them. But now we're really seeing adoption throughout these much larger aircraft in the market, even with professional pilots flying them to still have that option. It's cool to see it coming around.

Matt Thurber (22:48)

I think it's a great system. And the reason it's proliferating, I think, is because we're seeing so many airplanes get equipped with autothrottles. And once you have autothrottles, then it's not super complicated to install a system like Autoland. And if you look at the airplanes that we've had, I don't know, it seems like once every year or two.

Jessie Naor (22:58)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Thurber (23:11)

there's a depressurization event and you'll see the airplane on radar flying along till it runs out of fuel and crashes. And we have emergency descent mode in a lot of newer airplanes now, which can deal with that problem by bringing the airplane down to an altitude where you can breathe. But if the pilot has been hurt or injured,

the pilot might not wake up. With Autoland, it's going to bring you right down to the runway and save all the passengers at least. I think it's a system that gives a lot of comfort to passengers, but pilots as well.

Jessie Naor (23:46)

it's interesting to see how professional pilots may use it in the future. But yeah, I think maybe in those cases where they're starting to realize like, I'm hypoxic, maybe they'll be able to just quickly press the magic button and initiate.

Matt Thurber (23:59)

Yeah, exactly. And if they aren't able to whip on their oxygen mask fast enough, even if they don't push the Autoland button, it will go ahead and take over after a certain period that it detects the pilots not doing anything. I think it'll save a lot of lives.

Jessie Naor (24:19)

Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. And I mean, I think Garmin spent about $250 million to develop this. I think they're probably going to get every penny of that back in more. It's just such great technology. And again, it's the only the kind of the first, you know, versions of this autonomous assisted technology. That are emerging in aircraft. I can't wait to see where we go next. I've seen some one of the coolest ones I saw recently was especially for helicopters.

bird avoidance, you so it was an AI system that could automatically detect movement that looked like a bird or something that the helicopter could potentially run into that a pilot may not even see, may be in the corner of their eye, just doesn't catch their vision. But these technologies are certain to save lives. at some point, feel like pilots are already kind of just pushing buttons a lot of times in the cockpit. And we're going to get to the point where they don't even have to push the button. It's just going to, you know.

I automatically do things for them, which is amazing.

Matt Thurber (25:14)

Yeah, we're going to see some interesting technologies coming out.

If they benefit safety, all the better.

Jessie Naor (25:20)

But in other technology too, not just in the aircraft, but we're also looking at training centers now. CAE rolled out their Apple Vision Pro app they've just developed, which will allow pilots to do familiarization training before they get to the simulator. I think ultimately maybe.

even more than that. But this is pretty amazing and it reminds me of when we were running Grandview. There were lots of times, especially when it comes to differences training, where you just have very minor differences from cockpit to cockpit, even in a fleet that's all the same, there's always these little changes. And we had regular differences training every six months, but it was usually on a piece of paper, your standard paper tiger, where you sit there and plug, plug, plug. But imagine having a VR headset, you can just have it home, pop it on and.

Practice your procedures, This is a really cool update from them.

Matt Thurber (26:09)

Now, this is really important, I think, because a big problem for, especially for operators like Grandview with different aircraft and different equipment in the same aircraft is how do you get training for your pilots on that particular configuration? And it's really impossible to just build a bunch of full flight simulators or even training devices to reflect all those changes.

because these things just cost millions of dollars. So the big trend I see with application of virtual reality and mixed reality is that you can quickly adapt the design of the cockpit to whatever aircraft and configuration you need at a far, far lower cost. last year I got my commercial helicopter add-on rating and

One of my big complaints about the experience was that there was no simulator. And I think I could have benefited a lot from a decent simulator. But with this technology, you can build simulators at a fraction of the cost of some of the big simulators. And the benefit is not only being able to train pilots on these different configurations, but also to bring the training

away from the training center back to the operator where it has the best benefit. You know, it's really important to have good initial and recurrent training at the big training centers. But if you can do in between training at your place of business or maybe get together with other operators to buy some equipment and, you know, help pay for it together.

That's just going to be such a benefit for safety.

Jessie Naor (27:48)

yeah. Well, and again, too, you may go to initial and recurrent, but the differences, I mean, you're not getting into the Garmin 1000 every single time you fly. You're only used to the 3000. And we know automation errors are a huge problem right now.

Matt Thurber (28:01)

started.

Yeah. And some people might even use this equipment to, you know, if they're planning a flight to somewhere they've never been, just practice it in your local simulation lab and get ready for it. It'll make the flight a lot safer.

Jessie Naor (28:18)

I would love to see, you know, as people are starting to adapt to, flight data monitoring. So I think, you know, the benefits of when we look at flight data monitoring, you know, if you're really able to have a company where there's a safety officer that takes a look at a flight and goes, this approach was not good or this wasn't great.

Matt Thurber (28:25)

There you go.

Jessie Naor (28:36)

I mean, to be able to sit down with that crew member in a VR headset and say, okay, let's review like what happened. Now let's go back and actually practice this again. this, I mean, the training applications, you don't have to just sit in an airplane anymore and burn all that fuel and waste that, not waste that time. It is a good use of time, but this will, if the cost benefits and the savings and the additional benefits of the training that can occur are just massive. I just think this is so cool.

Matt Thurber (29:04)

yeah, absolutely. And in fact, I've gotten to try Loft Dynamics H125 simulator a couple of times now. And this thing is amazing. You can hover beautifully in it. You can practice emergencies that are just impossible to practice in the real helicopter. You can do full down auto rotations. You can practice scenarios like medevac scenarios and

Jessie Naor (29:10)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Thurber (29:27)

You can even do sling load training. It's really incredible. And this is a device that costs about a million dollars versus 15 to 20 million for a full flight simulator.

Jessie Naor (29:38)

and to be able to take company specific operations and use that during in-doc (initial training), the applications are endless and awesome. it'll be interesting to see who else adopts this. CAE is the first, but I'm sure many will be coming. And also in the eVTOL industry, this may be one of the only ways to get training initially, since we got that news that just came out about training.

This world is rapidly changing as well.

Matt Thurber (30:04)

Absolutely.

Jessie Naor (30:06)

Well, with that, we're gonna wrap up the pod today. We like to keep things short and sweet so that on your morning drive, you have all the news that you need to know in the industry. Make sure you like and subscribe and follow us at thevipseat.com. comments and suggestions on what we should cover next are always welcome. So we'll see you next time on the VIP