Bombardier's Longest-Standing Smart Services Customer Still Flies His 37-Year-Old Challenger 601 Most Days
Why It MattersA 37-year-old Challenger 601 still flying near-daily under factory support shows how long-lived business jets keep earning their place when a manufacturer's maintenance programme and owner-driven utility stay aligned.
What happened
Joachim "Ted" Naimer, Group President and Board Chairman of Kraus & Naimer, is Bombardier's longest-standing Smart Services customer. He continues to use his 37-year-old Bombardier Challenger 601 most days. His family purchased the jet in 1989, and last year it received a full interior refit.
Naimer lives in Ascona, Switzerland, on Lake Maggiore, in the modernist villa his Austrian parents built in 1964. He stopped piloting the aircraft himself on 30 June 2025, at age 76. He says he has logged more than 12,000 hours in the Challenger 600 and 601, and about 14,600 hours including other aircraft and helicopters. He had flown some aircraft almost every day for 45 years.
His father, Hubert L. Naimer, founded Universal Avionics in 1981, a maker of flight management systems and cockpit instrument displays. Naimer sold the company in 2018, when he was 68, saying it needed major investment and he did not want to leave without a successor while carrying that level of debt. He then started Innovative Avionics with many of the same personnel. Its main product, Amelia, is a voice-controlled device that reads out piloting checklists in emergency situations, and an initial order is in the pipeline.
Naimer says he flies almost every day, regularly visiting Vienna, Paris, Oxford and Stockholm, making twice-yearly trips to California, and taking an annual round-the-world trip to check on Kraus & Naimer's 19 sales and service companies. During that trip he stops in Tucson, Arizona, for a day so Bombardier can inspect the aircraft thoroughly.
Industry impact & what to watch
Owner-operated aircraft of this vintage sit at the opposite end of the market from newly delivered jets. Their economics rest on a paid-off airframe, a refit that refreshes the cabin without replacing the aircraft, and a manufacturer service programme that keeps maintenance predictable. Naimer's pattern of one scheduled inspection stop per year, folded into a trip he would make anyway, shows how an owner can fit factory support around a flying schedule rather than ground the aircraft for it.
The case also illustrates why programmes such as Smart Services matter to a manufacturer: a customer relationship that spans decades keeps an older fleet inside the OEM's support network. Naimer's own test of value is a single US$20 million contract won because the jet could go where it was needed on short notice.
The stated limit is the owner's own horizon. Naimer says the aircraft will keep flying as long as he can maintain it and needs it, so the next milestone is the first order for Amelia, the one item he says is in the pipeline.
