Evolution Management of Bellingham, Washington, has entrusted MRO organisation Constant Aviation to perform a Rockwell Collins ProLine Fusion upgrade, a 192-month cycle inspection, landing gear overhaul, FANS and a complete customised interior refurbishment on a Challenger 604 aircraft owned by one of its long-term customers. Work on the upgrades is scheduled to begin at Constant Aviation's Cleveland facility in June 2019.

“When evaluating the providers that could meet our needs and expectations for the upgrades on our 604, Constant Aviation made perfect sense,” says owner and director of aviation at Evolution Management Daniel Giliberto. “As we strive to integrate leading edge technology and create a world-class interior experience for our customers, Constant is a one-stop shop able to meet all our needs from the avionics upgrades, maintenance requirements and interior design."

Installing Nextant Aerospace's 604XT avionics package brings the 604 up to current, even future, standards. "The Fusion system has a lot of upgradability that we currently don't have, such as Synthetic Vision, FANS 1/A CPLC and Link 2000+," Giliberto continues. "This will be mandated in some form to fly the northern Atlantic tracks. It is not realistic to keep the old displays, which are old CRT technology, whereas these new displays contain a lot more information. They are interchangeable and dispatch reliability will go up quite a bit as a result, as will safety."

Pilots will also benefit greatly: "They will receive better information on the displays, such as multi-scan weather radar. Be it the XM Graphical Weather, TCAS 7.1 or a new auto-throttle from SafeFlight, the Pro Line Fusion's avionics are state-of-the-art. This client wanted to keep their 604 because they really liked it, so this upgrade is the most budget friendly option to make their aircraft future-proof.

“We selected Constant because it had the best offer for us. We admire the fact that it had the foresight to understand that there are 347 604s produced between 1996 and 2006, and that they are all going to be in the same boat, having to choose between what was, in my view, a band-aid approach to keep the aircraft flying, or this upgrade."

Giliberto visited Constant's facilities and was introduced to all the department heads that would be involved in the project. "We invest in long-standing relationships with clients, and we have been with this particular client for 12 years. For them, I needed to make sure that the project was going to be on budget, on time and of outstanding quality. Meeting the Constant team convinced me that this was going to be a great collaboration. Evolution Management is always looking for ways to evolve aviation and we are proud to be an early adopter on one of the first 20 604XTs."