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Winglets lift Tamarack to NAA flight success
A fly-off between two CitationJets, one unmodified and the other Tamarack-transformed, was a real-world comparison of Active Winglet performance and resulted in an NAA Most Memorable award.
NAA Award Winners Wick Zimmerman and Nick Guida.

Tamarack Aerospace, a provider of performance enhancement systems for business aircraft, received the NAA's Most Memorable Aviation Records Award at the association's Aviation Records Celebration on 28 April, 2022, at Lockheed Martin's Fighter Demonstration Center in Arlington, Virginia. The award was presented to the Tamarack team that set the record for flying non-stop from Portland, Maine to West Palm Beach, Florida on 26 January, 2021.

The details of the record-setting flight for the NAA designation of 'Speed Over a Recognised Course' include an average speed of 281.64 mph in a Cessna 525 CitationJet modified by Tamarack load alleviation Active Winglets. The award-winning jet is owned by John W 'Wick' Zimmerman, who co-piloted the aircraft with Tamarack Aerospace founder Nick Guida.

NAA decided the Tamarack modified jet team should be recognised as a 'Most Memorable' aviation record flight winner because the event was initiated and covered by the Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association (AOPA) and was actually a fly-off, or race, between a Tamarack Active Winglet modified aircraft and a similar jet with no modification. The modified CitationJet completed the course in just four hours and 35 minutes, despite a major headwind, and reached 41,000 ft without a step-climb, more than an hour faster than the unmodified jet that had to fly around bad weather and stop for fuel. The modified aircraft travelled 1,386 miles in the air and used a total of 2,610 pounds of fuel while the unmodified jet burned 3,650 pounds of fuel and spent five hours and 37 minutes in flight. The modified aircraft also landed with fuel in excess of the legal reserve requirements.

Wick Zimmerman says: "The record-setting flight, was a fun trip and one that I will always remember.” The Tamarack flight team is eager to set more records.

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