Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

In mid-2009, Qatar Airways received two 4,000-nmi-range Bombardier Challenger 605s and a Challenger 300 for new charter subsidiary Qatar Executive. The airline wants a piece of what it believes is still rising demand for on-demand, private charter services.&nbsp; 
“Despite the current global economic climate, there remains a strong need to travel to face-to-face business meetings in the shortest possible time,” said Qatar Airways chief executive Akbar Al Baker. “Whether flying from Doha to Bahrain for a breakfast meeting and back, or continuing to Dubai for lunch and further to Abu Dhabi for an early evening meeting before returning to Doha for dinner, the corporate jet makes this possible.” 
Qatar Executive, which benefits from the airline’s experience in having run Qatar’s Amiri Flight, will allow corporate and private travelers to book an aircraft as little as four hours before departure and check in 10 minutes before takeoff. 
“Forecast growth in the Middle East corporate market is expected to be 15 to 20 percent [a year] until 2012, so there is a clear opportunity for [us] to capitalize on this trend,” said Al Baker. The airline quotes Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) figures showing that the Middle East corporate market has grown at an average annual rate of 13 percent since 2000, with the region’s business jet fleet more than doubling in size from 200 to 450 during 2000-08. According to CAPA, the market is estimated to be worth $500- to $700 million a year. Individual wealth in the Gulf region is expected to grow by over 50 percent during 2008-12, up from $2.1 trillion to around $3.8 trillion, according to international management consultancy Oliver Wyman.
Al Baker said more aircraft will be introduced “in the not-too-distant future,” but he declined to be more precise. “We will want to be not too big, but it will depend on how successful we are in our business plan.”

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