While most FBOs earn their keep by taking care of passengers and flight crews, Gateway Aviation Services, the lone FBO at Arizona’s Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, has made a name for itself serving a different category of customer: aircraft manufacturers. Established in 1994 at the former Williams Air Force Base, the airport has three things in abundance, runway length (its three runways are all over 9,000 feet long), uncluttered airspace, and predictably unrelenting heat in the summer, all of which combine to make it an attractive venue for heat-soak testing for new aircraft programs. According to Matt Nebgen, the FBO’s director, this past summer, the location played host to four test programs: the Mitsubishi MRJ, the Boeing 737 Max, the Bombardier Global 7000, and engine tests on the Embraer E190, each of which brought dozens of technicians and engineers to the facility, with three of the programs taking up residence at the same time. All that activity was in addition to the FBO’s normal operations, plus its role as a seasonal firefighting base for the National Forest Service and its trio of DC-10s.
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