With December days slipping by, aviation professionals of many stripes are moving at Mach 0.925 to finalize last-minute details and ensure that customers are in the final on-boarding process on the way to ownership of their new or preowned business aircraft. Evidence is mounting that a measurable proportion of U.S. sales in the last weeks and months of 2018 have been brought forward by customers who have found themselves in a position to take advantage of the tax and accelerated depreciation benefits afforded by the December 2017 federal tax law changes. Given the high capital and operating costs associated, it is clear that few if any customers buy airplanes simply for the tax benefits that are associated with them; rather, they buy airplanes because they or their organizations have a need or desire for business aircraft. The associated tax or depreciation benefits can help take the bite out of writing those big checks to purchase an airplane, but the checks need to be written nevertheless.
Forecasters—and those who look to dust off their crystal ball once a year at about this time—are busy as elves at this time trying to make sense of the various forces that drive demand in what has become a much less predictable business aviation marketplace. On the new aircraft sales front, 2018 ended with most OEMs recording book-to-bills (a ratio of new aircraft orders to new factory deliveries) near or in most cases just above 1.0, the best such performance at an industry-wide level in 10 years.
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