Murdo Morrison: April 2010 Archives

 Few sectors of aviation were hit as badly by the downturn as business aviation. Think about it. Three groups of people tend to use business jets: senior executives or high-level professionals working for corporations being flown around their company's sites often in the company's own aircraft; lawyers and financiers for whom time is money; and high-end leisure users. All three categories have been walloped by the recession.

Remember the General Motors bosses who flew on the company's jet rather than drove to Washington DC to beg for a federal bail-out? It's 18 months ago, but such was the media and political backlash that business jets got lumped in with bankers' bonuses as a symptom of the blatant unfairness of a system that saw ordinary people lose their houses and jobs, while the elite continued to enjoy the privileges they had become accustomed to.

When the economy is booming so too is merger and acquisition activity. All major M&As require batallions of lawyers, accountants, bankers and consultants to fly around the world doing due diligence and crossing the t's. At hundreds of dollars/euros an hour, these guys do not do hanging around in airport security lines and taxi queues...and if you were paying the bill, neither would you want them to. When the M&A bandwagon stopped in 2007/2008 so did their travel

.

Finally - despite what the business aviation community would have you think - a lot of final destinations for those flying on private jets are golf courses, marinas, London hotels convenient for Harrods and chateaux. Okay, some of these flights are the perks for billionaires who spend 80h from Monday to Friday and much of their weekends making money that they pay big taxes on, but that's not important. What is important is that it goes without saying that the global financial crisis has decimated this sort of discretionary spending.

So as the industry gathers at Geneva next week for EBACE, the focus will be on detecting green shoots. It was last year too, and EBACE defied a lot of doubters by drawing the exhibitors and crowds. But in quarter two 2009, the financial crisis was still deepening. A lot of stands had already been booked in the still salad days of mid-2008. And after the torrent of bad news, the industry was determined to put on a brave face and persuade themselves, their customers and the media that things were getting better.

As events proved, they were getting worse. Business aviation traffic may have begun to stabilise mid-last year and used aircraft prices bottom out. But despite going into the downturn with record backlogs, plunging orderbooks soon put paid to them

 (think of all these air taxi and fractional start-ups that planned to acquire 60 jets and then promptly went bust) and manufacturers were forced to massively retrench.

We will have a big team - including me - at EBACE next week to take the temperature. My feeling is we will see plenty of optimism and relief that the worst is over. But the fragility of the recovery, worries about the effect of the so-called PIGS on the eurozone economy and the lingering effect of the production ramp-back, which will go on through 2011, will mean there will be few big programme, order or business start-up announcements.

Keep up with the latest from the show on www.flightglobal.com/ebace and read our take on the highlights from the three days in our 11-17 May issue.

Along with millions of others, here on Flightglobal we have our own tales of being grounded when we should have been somewhere else...although luckily no one has been stranded in the wrong country (many other weeks and it could have been completely different).

My personal experience is that today, tomorrow and Wednesday I should have been talking to recruiters in the UAE and Bahrain for our annual Middle East Careers Guide. The supplement, which we're moving back from its original 11 May publication date, focuses on the opportunities in the region's growing aviation and aerospace sectors for ex-pats, with pieces on the recruitment plans of Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways and several other airlines, engineering companies, business aviation operators and manufacturers. We also look at what it's like to live in the Gulf in terms of leisure, education, housing and lifestyle.

I'm rearranging my visit for a few weeks' time and we hope to publish the guide around Farnborough.

This is what we did last year.

Last week's closure of much of northern Europe's airspace was a salutory lesson in the challenges a weekly print magazine faces in covering an evolving story - and the great benefit we now have in being able to track it and add tremendous value online. I would say this, of course, but flightglobal.com's coverage of the story continues as I write to be magnificent, arguably better than anything on the web (although the BBC's coverage is excellent too).

The story broke on Thursday just as Flight International was going to press. At the time, we had no idea how the story was going to develop and the small Briefing piece which print readers will see this week (although some of them won't because their copies won't have left the UK) looks horribly out of date. We should have made more of our web coverage, although on Thursday we had no clue that the story would still be dominating aviation come today.

In our 27 April issue, we'll be looking back at the effect the closure has had on the industry and the lessons to be learned for the next time a volcano decides to blow its top in one of the busiest airspace regions in the world.

Some of you might be wondering what has happened to the World Airlines guide that we have been publishing in three parts each year since the 1990s. Well, this year we've decided to do something a bit different. The 170-page guide, which has full details on around 1,500 airlines, will be available as a free supplement with next week's issue of Flight International (20-26 April). So, if you're not a subscriber, make sure you reserve or pick up your copy from your newsagent as soon as possible. After that, you can get copies, but at £25 or $50 a time (still great value, we like to think, but we wouldn't want to do you out of one of the best bargains of the year). World Airlines, published in association with DVB, is an invaluable guide to the world's airline industry and if you get your hands on a copy we suspect it will end up well-thumbed by next year.