Fred is a senior editor and chief pilot with Business & Commercial Aviation and Aviation Week's chief aircraft evaluation pilot. He has flown left seat in virtually every turbine-powered business jet produced in the past three decades.
He has flown more than 195 makes, models and variants, ranging from the Piper J-3 Cub through the latest Boeing and Airbus large twins, logging more than 7,000 hours of flight time. He has earned an Airline Transport Pilot certificate and six jet aircraft type ratings, and he remains an active pilot. Fred also specializes in avionics, aircraft systems and pilot technique reports.
Fred was the first aviation journalist to fly the Boeing 787, Airbus A350 and Gulfstream G650, among other new turbofan aircraft. He’s also flown the Airbus A400M, Howard 500, Airship 600, Dassault Rafale, Grumman HU-16 Albatross and Lockheed Constellation.
Prior to joining Aviation Week, he was an FAA designated pilot examiner [CE-500], instrument flight instructor and jet charter pilot and former U.S. Naval Aviator who made three cruises to the western Pacific while flying the McDonnell-Douglas F-4J Phantom II.
Fred has won numerous aviation journalism awards, including NBAA’s David W. Ewald Platinum Wing Lifetime Achievement Award.
(Percent Relative to Average) The SJ30-2 was designed to maximize speed, range and fuel efficiency. That's apparent from the Comparison Profile, which includes the SJ30-2, Cessna CJ1+ and CJ2+, Raytheon Premier I and CJ3 in the composite average. This is a personal jet that's designed to transport two folks in the front and two folks in the main cabin more than 2,150 nm while cruising at 436 KIAS. The aircraft has the highest pressurization differential of any civil aircraft in current production. Its cabin altitude is only 1,800 feet at FL 490.
The SJ30-2's Primus Epic CDS, short for control display system, features three 10-by-eight-inch, portrait-configuration flat-panel displays. The outer left and right displays are PFDs and the left-of-center unit is an MFD. Standard equipment includes dual sets of Primus II radios with control units mounted in the instrument panel, TCAS, EGPWS, four-color weather radar, single radio altimeter, basic NZ2000 FMS and Iridium phone. Dual AHRS, yaw dampers, symbol generators and DADCs are included, along with a single-channel, three-axis autopilot.
Thursday, July 13, 2006, was a historic day for Sino Swearingen Aircraft. Just before noon, we touched down at San Diego-Montgomery Field (MYF) after a five-hour, 44-minute nonstop flight from New York's Westchester County Airport (HPN), marking the first time the SJ30-2 had flown coast-to-coast across the United States. It was also the first time since the introduction of the Learjet 36 in 1974 that a new, regular production light jet demonstrated a New York-to-California nonstop range capability.
