Aircraft

After four boom years for the sector, the mood at next week's National Business Aviation Association convention in Orlando will be reflective.

With chaos in US banking threatening to engulf the world economy, pessimists will be looking for first signs of orders and programmes being shelved.

Optimists will point to record orderbooks, buoyed by demand in markets that scarcely registered 10 years ago. In the following pages we assess the shape and size of the world's business aircraft fleet, prospects for US air taxis in the wake of DayJet's failure and the growth of the conversion market for regional airliners.

We look at the industry's safety record and get up close and personal to two exciting new programmes with a flight test of the Hawker 4000 and a cutaway and technical description of the Gulfstream G650.

Contents

• Market overview: What the business aircraft census tells us about the world
• US air taxis: Is the revolution over before it started? Or is best still to come?
• Hawker 4000 flight test
• Gulfstream 650 technical description
• Business aviation safety: How does the sector's safety record shape up?
• Regional jet conversions
• Numbers game

© Hawker Beechcraft A Hawker 4000