“There had to be a way of delivering the latest in business jet technology without doing a clean-sheet design,” said Jay Heublein, executive v-p of global sales and marketing for Nextant Aerospace, explaining the reasoning behind the Nextant 400XTi remanufacturing of the Beechjet 400/Hawker 400XP. The hundreds of millions of dollars needed to develop a new jet is a huge barrier, yet a well designed and -built jet has a long service life and could be an ideal platform on which to add new avionics and engine technology as well as aerodynamic tweaking using modern tools such as computational fluid dynamics.
Cleveland-based Nextant was launched in 2007 and is owned by Directional Aviation Capital, which also owns fractional-share operations Flight Options and Flexjet as well as MRO provider Constant Aviation, charter brokerage Sentient Jet, sales company Sojourn Aviation, parts distributor Aerospace Products International and Corporate Wings FBOs. Kenn Ricci founded many of these companies and is principal of Directional Aviation Capital.
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