Av8 Signs Five-Year Landing Gear Maintenance Agreement With Wheels Up for Phenom 300 Fleet

Av8, a Victor Sierra company, has announced a five-year landing gear maintenance agreement with Wheels Up. The agreement covers overhaul and exchange support for Wheels Up's Phenom 300 fleet. Wheels Up operates one of the largest Phenom 300 fleets in the world and has expansion plans.

Av8 will support the program through its landing gear exchange pool, which it describes as the largest in the industry, so aircraft can return to service without waiting on individual overhauls. The company says its support is backed by more than 300 FAA-PMA approvals for the Phenom platform and a broad portfolio of in-house RSDER-approved repair procedures. Those allow Av8 to offer flat-rate pricing across the program and what it describes as the longest warranty ever offered on Phenom 300 landing gear. Av8's recently acquired pool of rotatable inventory will also support the program.

Bryan Stamp, President of Victor Sierra, said a five-year commitment from a fleet of this size reflects the trust Wheels Up has placed in the team, and that supporting it exclusively through the exchange pool is the model that has made such partnerships work. Dave Holtz, Chief Operating Officer of Wheels Up, said the company achieved the highest Completion Rate and On-Time Performance in its history in the second quarter, and that partnerships like this help sustain that standard as the fleet grows. He said Av8's support adds predictability to Phenom 300 operations.

Av8 is an FAA- and EASA-certified repair station specializing in landing gear overhauls and PMA parts for commercial, business and general aviation. Victor Sierra is the parent company of APS, Av8, McFarlane Aviation and Tempest Aero Group.

Landing gear is a component where downtime depends on overhaul turnaround. An exchange pool changes that: the operator receives a serviceable unit and sends the removed one back for overhaul, so the aircraft's time on the ground is set by the swap rather than by the shop queue. For a large fleet of one type, that makes availability easier to plan, which is the point Wheels Up's COO makes about predictability.

Flat-rate pricing and a long warranty move cost and condition risk from the operator to the maintenance provider. That only works for a provider with enough rotable inventory and enough approved repair procedures to absorb unit-to-unit variation, which is why the announcement leans on the pool size, the PMA approvals and the RSDER procedures. Exclusive, multi-year exchange-pool arrangements of this kind tend to favour the providers that hold the deepest inventory for a given airframe.

For other Phenom 300 operators and competing landing gear shops, the test is how the terms hold up over the contract's five years: warranty coverage in practice, exchange turnaround as the fleet grows, and whether pool depth keeps pace with it. Av8's recently acquired rotatable inventory is the part of that capacity the company points to.