Customer Review – King Aviation, Las Vegas USA
March 17, 2022Cash Traylor, Director of Aviation
I am writing to express my appreciation for the extra mile that Start-Pac, and your engineer “Jim,” went in solving the GPU requirements of our flight department. We recently acquired an Embraer Praetor 500, and rapidly became aware of Embraer’s voltage sensitivities. We wanted a solution for in-hangar support (running the APU indoors is frowned upon) for servicing the avionics in this “flying computer.” We had a unique requirement, we wanted a portable (light weight) GPU that could supply the required power.
We only needed about 150 amps continuous, however the aircraft has a surge of over 350 amps for a short time while the nicads top up and stabilize. Unlike many other aircraft, there is no way to (easily) leave some systems off during power-up (no avionics switch). During power up the voltage must not go above 29.5 while “unloaded” and not drop below 28 volts while “loaded.”
We tried the 53300-28 initially, and it would power everything, but could not handle the initial “bump” and the main batteries would fall offline. The 400 amp unit was considered however Jim felt it would be better to pursue a higher voltage (>28) versus more amperage in a larger unit. After several discussions, he rapidly engineered a new product, and sent us the proto-type for testing. It is a new 29 volt unit, based on the already highly portableand lightweight 53300.
It worked PERFECTLY, and as I understand it may be added to the product line. This 53300/29 powers all electrical systems on our Praetor 500 and meets all our requirements. We are very happy with this unit, and appreciate Jim’s enthusiasm in creating a solution, for a problem that others were unable to solve. Due to the system similarities, I have no doubt this class of unit will power a Praetor 600 or the Legacy line.
Thank you,
Cash Traylor
Since supporting Cash and his team at King Aviation, we’ve added a new product to our range that is designed specifically to work with electrical systems on Embraer Preator aircraft.
View our Embreaer Preator compatible ground power unit here.
