JPMorgan’s latest business jet monthly report, released yesterday, indicates that October was another month of modest improvement in aircraft demand and utilization. Further, pre-owned business jet inventories fell for the third straight month, “and the peak for this cycle now seems more firmly behind us, but they remain at very high absolute levels,” noted JPMorgan aerospace analyst Joseph Nadol III. Inventory fell 0.3 points last month, to 13.3 percent of the “active fleet,” the third straight monthly decline and down from the “all-time high” of 14.5 percent in July, according to JPMorgan. All categories exhibited lower inventory, with light jets decreasing 0.4 points and midsize and large-cabin jets falling 0.2 points each. However, the declining pre-owned inventory didn’t stop prices from sliding for the 11th straight month, though the slip last month was just 0.5 percent. “While this was the smallest sequential decline of that period, prices are now down 22.3 percent year-over-year,” Nadol wrote. Meanwhile, JPMorgan said flight activity is stabilizing, with about 308,000 business jet takeoffs and landings in the U.S. logged in September, up 1.2 percent from August. “On a year-over-year basis,” Nadol noted, “September represented the first single-digit decline (-8.9 percent) after 15 months of double-digit contraction.”