Events
Annual ON-AIR Summit
December 12, 2016 12:00pm
The 2016 ON-AIR Summit will commence on December 12, 2016 at the Doubletree by Hilton at Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport. Our expert panel includes:
- Tim White of JetAVIVA and Diane White of Twin&Turbine
- Sean Purcell of Max Aero
- Tim McQueen of GE Aviation
Moderated by Jerry Siebenmark of the Wichita Eagle, this panel is sure to deliver some incredible insight into the impact of aviation across our great nation.
The annual Wichita Aero Club ON-AIR SUMMIT at the Doubletree Hotel by Hilton at Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport at noon on Monday, December 12, 2016 will feature a mixture of relatively new managers at two local companies and a pair of familiar voices who bring their perspective from a new situation, too. Sean Purcell will represent one of Wichita’s newest firms, Max AeroStructures and Tim McQueen, recently named head of General Electric Engines at Strother Field will be joined by Tim and Dianne White, both former VPs at Cessna who purchased Kansas City Aviation, a pre-owned aircraft sales outlet three years ago and merged with JetAviva in September. That panel will discuss “New Views on the New Normal.” It will be moderated by the Wichita Eagle’s Aviation Reporter Jerry Siebenmark.
“Since 2008 what was considered ‘normal’ for the business aviation segment has been an elusive and frankly unrealistic expectation,” said WAC President Dave Franson. “We lost thousands of jobs and hundreds of orders in the first couple of years of the downturn but the landscape and the expectations have been altered. Annual projections of optimism have been tempered for several years in a row and it has gotten to the point where it’s hard to know when things are going to return to a semblance of normal and what will ‘normal’ be?”
“There was a significant impact on our local aviation business community during the downturn, too,” Franson added. “We’ve seen bankruptcies, mergers, and cancellations of orders and programs. This summit will provide us with some new perspectives on where we go from here…and where the market is going, too.”
