Experimental aircraft tests bring veteran pilot to Yuma

Jeff Peer can't say everything.

He can't mention most of the projects he worked on while in the Israeli Air Force. The planes he flew for the U.S. government? He's hush on that, too.

What Peer can talk about is that he's a test pilot for AAI Acquisitions Inc. and was in town most of last week flying an experimental aircraft at Bet-Ko Air Jet Center.

Peer, a pilot for 45 years, was part of nine-person crew who used the Yuma skies to analyze the A700 - a seven-seat, turbofan-powered, carbon-composite aircraft.

"Yuma's a great place for us to do our hot-weather testing. We check the air-conditioning system on the ground after the plane is hot-soaked for four hours.

"We measure the temperatures to see how the cabin and cockpit can handle in extreme conditions. That's important. The FAA has hundreds of things they look for."

As chief test pilot, Peer is responsible for flying "experimental" aircraft and working out the kinks to meet the Federal Aviation Administration requirements and eventually go into production.

With a strict set of guidelines, a jet like the A700 could take up to five years to become certified. The "experimental" label simply means it's in the process of becoming FAA-approved.

While in Yuma, Peer and a team of engineers took the A700 on four test flights, gathering data for every instrument in the jet. They analyzed motion, stress and temperature, even stalling the engine to see how it would handle.

"There's quite a bit of tests we could do here that we couldn't do anywhere else because of airspace. For instance, in order to climb and descend, you need permission from air traffic control. The Marine base really helped us out there, allowing us to use their airspace and giving us the freedom to test whatever we needed to."

To date, Peer has logged 1,200 hours in the A700, doing just about every test imaginable since it was developed close to four years ago. Still, there's more work to be done.

"After this we're headed back to Denver to do more testing and to go through all the data we collected here. We still have a lot of work to do, but we're getting there. The A700 is a priority for the company," Peer said.

The A700 is set to be certified by the end of 2009, then will hit production. How it handled during its four days in Yuma, Peer can't talk about it right now, but did hint it was a good week.

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Jared Dort can be reached at jdort@yumasun.com or 539-6873.