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The flight arrived on time in Sao Paulo and things went smoothly through immigration and customs. An Embraer driver was waiting to take me up to San Jose dos Campos -- about 75 miles north of Sao Paulo. Sao Jose dos Campos is a city of more than 600,000 people and headquarters of Embraer, the third largest aircraft manufacturing company in the world. The hotel Caesar Business would be my home for the next six nights.
The
shuttle bus from the hotel to Building F-300 -- the delivery hangar --
takes about ten minutes, the last several of which is driving by the
immense Embraer facilities where 15,000 people work. As I walked in the
door, I was greeted by Mark Steer and Bill Minkoff of JetQuik who introduced me to Paulo Negreiros, Contracts Administrator and Marcelo Cruz, Configuration Engineer. These four people became very special to
me as the week unfolded -- I plan to maintain contact with them in the
months and years ahead.
The
original plan had been to arrive on Monday, start the three-day process for inspection and closing, and then depart on Thursday
for the U.S. However, I had received a call on Day -3 that there was something wrong with the airplane. Turns out the problem was a tendency for the
plane to roll while at cruise but the engineering team was able to make
an adjustment to the flaps which corrected the problem. Nevertheless,
there was a delay. Bill began the flight planning for a possible Friday
departure -- routes, weather forecasts, fuel prices, hotels, and local
transportation.
During
the afternoon there were two positive developments relayed to us by
Marcelo and Paulo. First was the news that Embraer had arranged for a
shuttle flight the next day to take us up to the production plant in Gavião Peixoto,
where major components are manufactured and flight testing is
conducted. We would then bring the plane back to the delivery center. This sounded like a good idea to me because I had wanted to
see the factory there anyway. Later in the afternoon there was a second
surprise development -- the Phenom 100 would be arriving at the delivery center in Sao Jose dos Campos today!
We
waited on the tarmac in the cold breeze and around 7 PM we saw a plane
making the approach. As it turned onto final, there was
no mistaking that it was the Phenom. It was thrilling to see the Phenom
taxi up to building F-300. After shutdown the door opened and out came
Captain Rafael Silva, Embraer Test Pilot. There was not enough light to
take good pictures so that had to wait for Day 3 in the hangar. We
would also get to know Rafael much better as it turned out he would be
in the cockpit on the flight home on Day 10.
Bill, Mark, and I met up back at the hotel with Adam Letts, Director of Operations at Executive AirShare, a fractional Phenom ownership company based in Kansas City, Missouri, and Rob Posselt, a partner at JetSolutions - Europe. We went to a casual Brazilian restaurant -- I could not pronounce the name of the large fish which was their specialty -- but it was the first of a string of tastes of Brazil's excellent food.
Day 3 would begin the process of inspecting and acquiring the Phenom. Stay tuned.
There are also some more pictures uploaded.
Aviation October 16, 2009 06:23 PM
No trip away from home is complete without looking for a geocache. According to 
After simmering down a bit over dinner following the unbelievable bureacracy trap of the day, Bill, Mark and I decided to take a ride on Saturday up to 
