Nextant has secured an anchor customer in China under a sales agent agreement with China Great Wall Industry Corp. (CGWIC) that includes an initial order for up to 18 Nextant 400XTs valued at $89 million. The agreement, which makes CGWIC Nextant’s exclusive sales agent for the greater China region, also calls for CGWIC to help establish service, sales support and parts distribution in China.

Signature Flight Support received a green light on its largest yet fixed-base operation project, an $82 million complex at Mineta San Jose International airport. The San Jose City Council on April 16 voted 10-1 to approve a 50-year lease for the FBO, which will be developed on 29 acres at the west side of the airport. As part of the development, Signature is relocating its headquarters from Orlando, Fla. to its new San Jose, Calif. base.

New markets are targeted following company shake-up

Chances are pretty good that the pilots who will fly the cockpits of tomorrow are today sitting in front of a computer, playing very life-like 3-D video games. Studying how those young minds learn will be crucial to developing not only the cockpit and interfaces, but also the training regime.

American Airlines may have unwittingly found a new use for the 8,500 iPads that its pilots now carry to hold aircraft documents and charts: electronic flight plans. It turns out the computer “glitch” the company experienced on April 16 had nothing to do with the Sabre reservation system, as first reported, and everything to do with flight plans. The glitch caused a shutdown of the carrier's U.S. network for several hours, resulting in the cancellation of hundreds of flights and lingering disruptions through the next day.

What do you think? Where can we do better?

A line from The Beatles' rock anthem “Back in the U.S.S.R.” nicely sums up a recent morning for Capt. Roger Moore as he piloted an “airliner” from New York to San Francisco: “On the way, the paper bag was on my knee. Man, I had a dreadful flight . . . .” Moore had just endured 5 hr. of constant turbulence, but along with getting paid, he did it for a good cause: making sure certain next-generation avionics are a good fit for the flight deck.

Indonesia's Lion Air will continue to grow its fleet, despite the April 13 incident at Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport in which the airline's Boeing 737-800, local registration PK-LKS, landed in the sea—short of Runway 09—and broke in two. All 108 people onboard survived, but 46 were hospitalized. Lion President Rusdi Kirana said none of the injuries were critical.