Chris Cartwright and Paul Wilkinson, the founders of former handling and flight planning specialist Feras, are back in business with a new venture to support operators flying into Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States and Central Asia. EVO Jet Services will coordinate all support services from a single 24-hour operations center.
“We are sensitive to the industry slowdown and cost-savings requirements of operators. That is why we no longer think multiple operations centers in Moscow and Prague are the answer,” Cartwright told EBACE Convention News. “We are centralizing in a lower cost area that provides better support to our ground-handling personnel at each station.” With centralized processing of finance, administration, permit applications and fuel and handling requests, EVO Jet Services has been able to lower overheads at its various airport bases and allow its handlers to focus on service delivery.
Another innovation from EVO Jet is to start offering free departure flight plans and weather information to its handling clients. The company’s thinking is that flight plans and weather are fairly simple and inexpensive services and it would prefer to focus its revenue-yielding operations on the more complex tasks of quickly arranging flight permits and providing handling and fuel in difficult locations.
“Any good flight planner and meteorologist will tell you that it is not rocket science to deliver a preferred route and accurate en route weather forecast,” argued Wilkinson. “The challenges are more about delays from permit hassles, disappointment in catering quality or simply inattentive handlers. We aim to address the issues which most often can make a good trip into a bad one in the passenger’s view.” |
According to EVO Jet (which takes its name from the word evolution), 2008 saw a lot of ground-handling support service disappear across Russia and the former Soviet Union. In part this was due to the effective dissolution, due to protracted legal proceedings, of the Feras network established in the region by Cartwright and Wilkinson in the early 1990s.
