Bombardier announced yesterday that it will be doubling its fleet of customer response team (CRT) trucks with a planned total of 14 trucks in operation by the end of the year.

“Our customers are learning to love the small jobs that can be done right in the hangar, eliminating a flight to a maintenance facility,” said Stan Younger, the OEM’s vice president of customer support and training. “We’re going from 2,100 unplanned maintenance events in 2011 and this year we’ll see 4,500 and so customers are starting to learn how to use that CRT truck as a tool.

One of those mobile units will be attached to a new line maintenance station located in France at Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur, to provide AOG/line service to customers in the French Riviera. The Bombardier service center in Amsterdam will support the services there. The other CRT trucks, which are crewed by highly skilled nonspecialized technicians, will be deployed in Columbus, Ohio; Houston; Miami; the San Francisco Bay area; Washington, D.C.; and White Plains, N.Y.

The company invites NBAA visitors to examine one of the trucks here at the static display. In the wake of its launch of the Challenger 650, the Canadian airframer said it will offer its Challenger 605 customers a suite of upgrades that will provide them with many of the same features available on the new aircraft. Bombardier expects to roll them out as a series of optional service bulletins starting late next year.

The program is similar to the upgrade package offered for the Challenger 300, which started last year, and will focus on the Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21 Advance avionics suite, adding synthetic vision, FANS, MultiScan weather radar, ADS-B, LPV and head-up guidance system with enhanced vision.