Portugal’s Air Luxor group has restructured most of its business aviation activities under a new subsidiary called Masterjet. The company decided to abandon the name Air Luxor Corporate Jets, partly due to negative perceptions of the name associated with an incident last year in which a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 operated by Egyptian carrier Luxor Air almost crashed into the French city of Nantes. Luxor Air has since been banned from using the airspace of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, following an inquiry into the operator’s safety standards.

Masterjet is involved mainly in aircraft management and executive charter, with bases in the Portuguese capital Lisbon and at Paris Le Bourget Airport. Its managed fleet currently consists of a Cessna Citation X and a Citation Excel, a Dassault Falcon 900, a Raytheon Hawker 800 and an Airbus Corporate Jetliner (ACJ).

The ACJ is flown only on behalf of its owner, but Masterjet expects to add two more of the type in the near future and these will be offered to the charter market.
Masterjet expects Airbus to confirm the company as its new ACJ sales agent for Portugal.Masterjet is already Cessna’s dealer in the country.

According to Masterjet v-p of finance and administration Philippe Quefflec, while charter demand has remained fairly quiet over the past year, his company has still been busy, largely due to flying activity on behalf of the aircraft owners themselves.

Masterjet also provides business aircraft handling through its FBOs in Lisbon, and on the islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé. It expects to open new facilities in the Saudi Arabian cities of Riyadh and Jeddah–in part to support its ACJ operations in and out of that part of the world. The company is exploring the possibility of opening new FBOs in Mozambique and Angola.