Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Shed a tear for the business jet business

Great Depression 2.0 put the kibosh on bizjet sales.  Aviation Week shows a graph with a big peak in 07 and 08 followed by a steady decline.  Naturally, as an industry spokesmagazine, Aviation Week is all in favor of more bizjet business. 
   In actual fact, the bizjets are mini airliners, nearly as expensive as a full size single aisle airliner.   Expensive to own and expensive to fly.  Only the biggest and richest companies have the money to play with them.  For the top brass of a big rich company, a company jet is a very nice perk.  Tax exempt too.  For the shareholders, employees, and other stakeholders, a bizjet is money wasted that could have gone to expansion, new product development, dividends, wages, and plenty of other useful ends.  In actual fact, the company brass can jolly well fly commercial, everyone else does. And since Great Depression 2.0 struck, the company stakeholder's views are prevailing over the views of top management. 
     In the real world, jet aircraft are so expensive that only air carriers who will fly them everyday can make economic sense for ownership.  No corporate flight operation is going to fly a bizjet as hard as a real aircarrier will.  If for some obscure reason the company bigwigs cannot fly commercial they could charter a bizjet for a lot less than it costs to own one. 
    And Aviation Week goes on at length about new and advanced bizjet models that might revive the market. 

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