Farnborough, UK-based Gama Group continues to grow, opening its new aircraft management base at Switzerland’s Geneva Airport last month and announcing a range of investments at Glasgow Airport in Scotland for next year, including a new hangar and executive aircraft handling terminal.

Last month the company celebrated the first year of operations at Fairoaks Airport near Farnborough, where it established Gama Engineering at what was the birthplace of the Gama company in the 1980s.

At an opening ceremony for the Geneva facility on November 9, Gama Aviation general manager Hamish Ross said that the opening takes the company’s number of operational bases to more than 30 around the world, and that a new Swiss air operator certificate should be in place by early next year. The operation began with a GV and Learjet 45, joining another Gama Learjet based at Zurich.

The developments at Glasgow (see Touching Bases, page 60) will “afford operators a new tech stop between North America and the Middle East in particular,” said Gama in a statement. Glasgow lies on the great-circle route between New York and the United Arab Emirates. “For example, the Glasgow Gama Aviation Executive Terminal will link Gama’s Teterboro FBO with its new facility in Sharjah, UAE.”

Gama Engineering managing director Harry Lees told AIN that its design office at Fairoaks has recently completed its 50th STC–the design and certification of a Garmin G600 Efis for a Britten-Norman Islander of the Belgian Coastguard.

The Fairoaks operation also carried out pyrotechnic modifications at short notice to a Tecnam aircraft used in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. Lees said that the next priority is to expand rotary-wing aircraft maintenance activity, in line with the history of the operation that was formerly in the hangars it now occupies, Mann Aircraft Group Engineering. He also told AIN that a major investment is planned at the airfield to expand Gama’s operations there.