The Breitling Jet Team is back home
The Breitling Jet Team is back! After a 44.000 km trip across Asia, the seven Albatros planes are back in France for winter and maintenance operations.
By Olivier Müller
This Asia tour was a great premiere for the well trained pilots, which captain Jacques Bothelin shows an impressive 11.500 hours of flight for 2800 demos around the world.
The Breitling Jet Team is the only private jet team in the world. A serious thing? «Our job is to entertain people», Bothelin says. Indeed, but a serious entertainment. Flying over Siberia in October was kind of a challenge. «We were stuck on the ground by the weather conditions. Fueling is a difficult thing to do in Siberia!»
Hiroshima and Fukushima
«We were there at the beginning of the story in 2003 and will keep on entertaining people as long as our bodies let us do it», confesses Bothelin. And the team had his share of fun and historic moments, such as in Japan where the Breitling Jet Team was the very first private team in the country's history to have the authorization to land. A very welcoming country, which was not necessarily the case all the time, for instance in Russia, where passports were held by local authorites for administrative - and obscure - reasons for hours...while pilots were already in their planes, ready to take off!
However, in some places, figures had a special taste: «landing in Hiroshima is a very unique experience», says one of the pilots. «Flying over Fukushima was also very intense», follows Bothelin. «We did not had the opportunity to make this flight over the tsunami's place when we had scheduled it», says Bothelin. «But our mission would have been something like...uncomplete, without this flight. We contacted the Breitling teams and finally agreed on a new budget and timeframe to go there again. It was in last August and was very intense.»
Breitling teams ready to take off again
On the products's side, «before the end of the year, the Emergency II should be in store», told us Thedy Schneider, Breitling's president. This new model is currently in Canada for low temperatures tests. It has already been approved by all the safety regulatories and should be shipped anytime soon.
In terms of brand ambassadors, David Beckham will now be exclusively dedicated to the promotion of the Bentley partnership, in order to leave the aerospace area clear for the pilot actor John Travolta, long-time friend of the B-winged brand.
What about the Breitling Jet Team? «In 2014 we'll stay in Europe», says Schneider. And in 2015? «Overseas», that's all we can learn...for now.
