LAS VEGAS—Uncertainty grips the global business jet market for North America, its largest single sector, leading to a drop in optimism, says aviation market intelligence specialists JetNet.
The jittery outlook comes despite record business jet order backlogs and “solid demand” JetNet Director Rolland Vincent said at the National Business Aviation Association convention here. Vincent presented results from the latest owner-operator survey conducted by JetNet iQ, the company’s advisory and forecasting service.
“Uncertainty is the word right now, whether it's geopolitical, political or election-oriented,” he said. “[These factors] aren't so silly because they create policy impacts that can drive our industry down, sideways or in a direction we don’t know. Uncertainty is the No. 1 word that we see. We see it all over our data.
“We're in a really strange place. Confidence is the lowest we’ve ever seen [since the COVID-19 pandemic], so what's going on? A lot of things,” Vincent said. “There are three regional wars, which are potentially global wars bubbling. Things are going on in Washington around this election. We've got some real strange times. We've got a potentially rising interest rate market. People are very confused. Uncertainty is profound right now. People don't like uncertainty. And what's the one thing that people do when they're uncertain? They don’t do anything.”
Despite the subdued optimism from the survey’s 26,000 respondents, demand and pricing remain good. Original equipment-makers’ order backlogs continue to grow, reaching record levels of over $51 billion for the first half of 2024—up 2% on the $50.4 billion logged in 2023. Most of the growth is “occurring in the light-to-midsize segment, not the large segment that everyone talks about,” Vincent noted.
Much of this surge in demand is a fallout of the “great rebalancing” of the market following the pandemic, Vincent noted. Now the challenge is “to deliver on the products and services that we promised we're going to do,” he added. Supply chain recovery continues to be a major watch item. “We're still working down the backlogs that we took a couple of years. Let's get through that,” he said.
Beyond repairing the product and service supply chains, JetNet’s survey highlights the need to rebuild talent pipelines and retool for the next-generation customer requirements. Vincent said boosting the sector’s approach to sustainability is also vital—particularly in North America.
“We are not ready as an industry for this future that we're moving into. Europe is ahead of the curve on this,” Vincent said. “They're saying things. They're making rules. They're thinking about things that in North America we aren’t—or if we are, we're putting it off. I think it's a very dangerous thing to do because 2050 is coming soon. It's something like a fast train, a high-speed train.”
Another key challenge noted in the survey is concern over the shortage of maintenance, repair and overhaul capacity—an issue flagged by 15.7% of respondents.
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