European Business Aviation is Doing a Really Bad Job of Supporting Business.

Quite a statement and the obvious question we then have to ask ourselves is why?

Lets take a moment to establish some context. Business aviation should be a tool that drives economic growth by enabling business performance and driving efficiency. We know this because the EBAA and Booz Allen Hamilton have published a report which tells us this, you can read it here.

Business Aviation allows for increased productivity in transit and increased productivity from reduced transit times.

At the same time we have virtually no real growth in terms of passengers across Europe and the aircraft manufacturers are reducing their delivery forecasts and complaining loudly about the weakness in the market squeezing their margins on new aircraft.

This is important because without sufficient margin, manufacturers are unable to effectively invest in new technology and aircraft programmes which should benefit business aviation by offering more efficient aircraft and therefore reduced operating costs.

Now look at Europe in a geographic context. According to Wikipedia it is 10,180,000 square kilometres which sounds big but despite what we might think it actually isn’t. What this means is that all of Europe’s principle cities and industrial regions are all give or take within a couple of hours of each other.

Again this is important because it means you don’t need a Global or a G650 in order to be able to achieve the sort of benefits that the EBAA report describes. That is massive because it means you don’t have to invest in a $60m aircraft (of course you can if you want to!) but instead the same world of increased business efficiency and growth is available to you by using smaller and much cheaper aircraft.

Smaller and cheaper maybe but still flying at roughly the same height and speed as their Global big brothers and almost definitely quicker than their commercial airliner cousins.

Happy days! Get me some light jets, we are in business!

Right, we need an office in Mayfair, a glossy website, lots of shiny images of beautiful people, chuck in some champagne and canapes and the odd picture of an aircraft, lets sell all these business advantages with some images of luxury and opulence, because that is always going to convince hard pressed businesses around Europe about how useful we really could be to them.

Next we need a BIG glossy launch party, maybe in Geneva or Cannes and lets pack it out with beautiful people and lots of free booze (err Champagne?), because again that is going to help us to relate to the our prospective audience of businesses who are looking to understand the benefits that business aviation could offer them.

What about routes? Well looking at the latest data it seems that most current users of business aviation only want to travel between London, Paris, Geneva and the French Riviera. Sorted, so we concentrate everything on those hubs (almost like a mini airline) and get really close to all of our competitors and try to take their customers. We can do this by undercutting their prices

….perfect, the passengers are flooding in.

Wait a moment, they’ve gone again, it seems our competitors cut their prices.

Right cut our prices again and repeat. But wait the finance department are screaming at us that we are losing cash and we can’t cut any further….

Ok, start selling all our empty legs on one of the new modern app thingy platforms that make it really easy for customers to book our empty legs, that’s like money for nothing, right?

Of course everybody else is doing that so we will have to make them really cheap.

But wait the finance department are really screaming now, the cash is almost gone….

Ok, marketing team, lets set up another really BIG party in Monaco this time, let’s use a yacht and get some new customers.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Surely we have to change the model and get away from the ever decreasing circle that is London-Paris-Geneva-French Riviera. Yes there is some traffic there but if our only hope is to cannibalise that traffic with constantly reduced prices and eroded margins it rapidly becomes unsustainable.

Let’s get back to business. In Europe the industrial or business heartlands tend to congregate around Central Europe think UK, Ireland, Benelux, Germany, Northern France, Scandinavia and the Baltic’s, that’s where we need to be focusing.

The right product, at the right price, selling the real benefits of business aviation to actual businesses that might benefit from those services.

Who knows, it might just work!?

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