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.
On Feb. 27, Cessna's Model 680 Citation Sovereign prototype made its first flight from Wichita-Mid Continent Airport, marking the start of a 2,000-flight-hour, 19-month flight-test program. This is to culminate in certification in late 2003 and initial customer deliveries in early 2004. The first prototype aircraft, CE680 Serial Number 000P, will be used primarily as an aerodynamic certification flight-test article. It also will be used for ice shape trials.
From its introduction in 1965 until production ceased in the mid-1980s, Dassault's Falcon 20 was a great airplane awaiting suitable engines. That seems to be the consensus of operators of TFE731-powered Falcon 20 aircraft contacted by B/CA for this evaluation.
In September 1999, Tom Horne, a senior experimental test pilot for Gulfstream Aerospace, found himself drowning in a sea of yellow envelopes. He had just been permanently assigned the task of updating the flight department's worldwide Jeppesen charts. Every 14 days, he had to remove and replace as many as 2,000 approach, arrival, departure, airport, taxiway and en route charts, or about five percent of the 40,000 published procedures.
