Winglets Give Jets Style, Speed Seattle Company Flying High As Business Venture Takes Off

Most of Aviation Partners’ customers buy its “winglets” to improve the look of their corporate jets. They’re so elegant the New York Museum of Modern Art has inquired about displaying them, the company’s chief executive officer says.

But the $450,000 winglet modification package, which adds vertical 6-foot airfoil extensions at the tip of aircraft wings and makes other technical enhancements, also can cut fuel consumption by 7 percent to 8 percent, says Joe Clark, also the company’s founder.

The winglet concept got off the ground last summer, when a modified Gulfstream II landed at the Paris Air Show after a 10-hour, 36-minute flight from Van Nuys, Calif. The plane averaged 532 mph and made just one stop for fuel, in Labrador.

This is the first year Aviation Partners has turned a profit, said Clark, who declined to disclose its earnings.

A Gulfstream II with winglets, derived from the spread, upwardly deflected feathers at the tip of bird wings that reduce drag during flight, can fly faster and cruise about 1,500 feet higher than a standard model, Clark said in a recent interview.

It also will be able to fly about 210 nautical miles farther, he says.

Clark hopes to eventually see winglets on commercial aircraft.

“The existing wingtips are too small and not shaped properly,” he said.

His vision calls for retrofitting early model Boeing 727s, 737s and 747s, and McDonnell Douglas DC-9s.

“There’s a lot of life still left in those airplanes,” Clark said.

With a 15-1/2-foot Aviation Partners winglet, a Boeing 747-200 could fly 45 minutes to an hour longer and 3,000 feet higher at the same weight as standard models, he said. That could save a million gallons of fuel in a year, based on daily average flight time of 16 to 18 hours.

The II SP performance enhancement system, developed with Gulfstream Aerospace in Savannah, Ga., has been installed in 26 planes and there are orders for 12 more.

Over the next five years, Clark said he hopes his 40-worker company will retrofit between 125 and 150 Gulfstream IIs about 75 percent of the fleet.

Aviation Partners also is working to develop spiroids - 360-degree, 6-1/2-foot-diameter upgraded winglets for Gulfstream IIs. That version should be flying by next year, he said.

The winglets concept has been considered by plane designers since the 1900s, but first showed on commercial aircraft during the fuel crisis of the 1970s.

Clark got into the business in 1991. A co-founder of commuter Horizon Air, now owned by Alaska Air Group, he started Aviation Partners with a loan from Montana businessman Dennis Washington, who wanted winglets on his own Gulfstream II. Washington so far has put $7 million into Aviation Partners.

Clark assembled a “dream team” of retired Boeing and Lockheed aerodynamicists and flight-test engineers. Their designs are put into carbonfiber, aluminum and stainless-steel reality by Nordam Inc. of Tulsa, Okla.

When Clark went to Gulfstream with the idea, he says the chairman dismissed it as impossible: “I remember he told me it would be like putting hubcaps on a Cadillac. Nobody believed it would work.”

The first winglet system was installed on a Las Vegas-based Mirage Gulfstream II belonging to Golden Nugget Aviation in June 1993, after the product was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration.

After about 15 packages were sold, the product began to get noticed.

Investing in a winglet makes a lot more sense than spending millions to upgrade a corporate fleet, said Jon Winthrop, president of The Air Group of Van Nuys, Calif., which manages corporate jets.

“Even if the price of a winglet system had been $1 million, we probably would have bought it,” he said in an Aviation Partners newsletter.

Tom Hartman, director of Hilton Hotels Aviation, says they make flights to Hawaii comfortable against most head winds.

“Winglets made our Gulfstream II look 20 years younger and gave us back the Pacific,” he said.

Barron Hilton, chairman of Hilton Hotels, “said the only reason they wanted our winglets was because they looked so good,” Clark said. “He said later he had no idea they would perform so well.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: BACK SUPPORT Getting a “winglet mod” is like flying with a 35-knot tail wind.