Despite commercial airline activity making its global post-pandemic comeback, it’s been a summer of high demand and traffic for business jets. This comes after 2021 saw private jet usage soar to its highest level on record. WingX recorded 3.3 million business jet take-offs in 2021, the most for a single year and 7% more than the previous high in 2019. So business jet travel is booming, and no one involved in the industry will be surprised.
Passengers' needs are always evolving with the times, and in order to keep them satisfied, business aviation has to keep up. Millennials are accounting for increasing numbers of business jet users that will expect to use inflight broadband at the same rate as they would use WIFI while at home or in the office. And with such rapid technological advances in consumer electronics, streaming and video gaming are commonplace, and even watching ultra-high definition 8K video and virtual reality (VR) interactions are also quickly becoming the norm. These advances demand increasingly powerful inflight broadband—a new level of connectivity for business jets.
Affecting change is all about working together—not just within an industry but with external partners. There can be little doubt that a solid industrial strategy is a key to producing real change in how an industry does business and the impact of its practices. It’s vital for the whole government to work in partnership with industry in order to lay out the long-term direction needed to instill new best practices and maintain confidence for ongoing investment.
In the final UAS Forward Discussion at EBACE, we put the focus on charter operations, the relationship between charter brokers and operators, and how this dynamic will continue to evolve in the future. We were delighted to welcome some of the industry’s outstanding charter experts representing both brokers and large and small operators. They were Julie Black of Hunt and Palmer, Bernhard Fragner of Globe Air, Fadi Al Samad of Elit'Avia, and Alex Durand of SaxonAir. We were also happy to welcome the European Business Aviation Association’s (EBAA’s) Paul Walsh as moderator. As well as giving a great insight into the current state of the charter market globally, the panel discussion also explored whether smaller operators could compete with the rise of the mega operator.
During EBACE, we at UAS were determined to unite some of the best thought leaders in our industry to have some meaningful and insightful discussions about the trends that are impacting us all right now. In the first of The Forward Discussion panels, we focused on how technology and its power to transform business aviation by optimizing efficiency and quality and bringing greater efficiency with less manpower.