Business and corporate aviation faces its most daunting challenges in the six decades since innovative people put comfy chairs, a coffee pot and windows into surplus WWII warbirds for the mobility of industry’s movers and shakers. Nobody envisioned the global financial mess we find ourselves in when they expressed confidence that business aviation is now deeply entrenched enough to ride out the next trough. This one has the potential to be more like a Moses water-parting, exposing hard seabed, than a trough with some cushioning, and it will be a severe test of a business aircraft’s worth.
On page 10 of this issue are the prognostications of experts, some of them with a vested interest in cheerleading for business aviation. Their research is based on surveys of users’ purchasing and upgrade plans, however, and the surveys’ results, while varying to degrees, suggest that nobody appears to be wearing especially rose-tinted glasses. By way of counterpoint, one business aviation consultant sees prospects through MIB dark glasses, predicting that “If they haven’t already, new aircraft orders are poised to fall off a cliff.” OEMs generally concede that their order backlogs, massive in some cases and stretching halfway through the next decade, will undergo adjustments but remain hopeful about prospects.
