Adaptability, Leadership, Kindness Critical For Bizav: Martyn Fiddler

The business aviation sector would likely argue that, among its attributes, few are as important as its inherent adaptability and agility. But if ever those qualities have been needed, it has been in 2025.

At the start of the year, particularly in Europe, sector insiders often felt as though they were under attack: from environmental and other political protests, and from governments which had begun to target the sector for additional or higher taxes. The February announcement of U.S. tariffs—and their subsequent postponement, revision, and eventual apparent cancellation—required professionals throughout the sector to plan for a host of different potential outcomes and stand ready to assist customers facing any of them. All this came as the industry was feeling the lingering after-effects of the pandemic, while still wrestling with a global talent shortage and amid ongoing challenges with a disrupted and widely distributed supply chain.

In this context, what business theorists call “thought leadership” has arguably never been more urgently required. Yet few entities within business aviation seem well-positioned to help shepherd the sector through these turbulent and unpredictable times. Many focus on keeping their heads down and working on the elements they can control, which is often only the work they do inside their organizations. Political changes can challenge even long-held company priority decisions—witness the Trump administration’s reversal of previous U.S. government policies around sustainability and emissions reduction. Any bizav leader advocating any particular path forward seems more likely to ignite controversy than grow consensus.

So it is rare to find individual companies willing to tackle these problems, but one such is the Isle of Man-based tax and legal services firm Martyn Fiddler. The company produces an annual State of Business Aviation Report, which it not only uses to address some of these broader, more existential questions and examine them from a bizav perspective but does so within an unusually wide frame of reference. The 2025 edition looks at a series of issues raising questions for the industry, from regulation and sustainability to the emergence of generative AI tools, and does so by quoting figures as diverse as the martial arts icon Bruce Lee, inventor and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, and John Tuld, the character played by Jeremy Irons in the 2011 film “Margin Call,” who advised his colleagues to “be first, be smarter, or cheat.”

“Business aviation is small: it’s lots of different companies,” says Heather Gordon, Martyn Fiddler’s legal director, and the lead author of the report. Those small businesses, she suggests, are (quite properly) focused on doing the right thing by their customers and their staff. This can lead to an over-reliance on pre-existing plans, which is understandable but may not always be helpful.

“You know you’ve got to get from A to B,” Gordon says. “You have a plan. You’ve got the destination in mind. But other things are going to happen without any notice, and you have to deal with them en route. It doesn’t mean completely changing course—the plan is still there. But [you need] an adaptive strategy. Often you see it—in both big companies and smaller companies—that they have the plan and they just keep sticking with the plan. They don’t adapt because the plan is there: it was a good plan, so why would we change it?”

Both individual businesses and the sector as a whole need to become better at adapting solid plans, Gordon argues—particularly in an era where external change seems to be happening at greater pace and with what appears to be historically low levels of predictability. This is where thought-leadership comes in: businesses willing to chart a course rather than constantly having to respond to the prevailing conditions are more likely to be able to stick to their established plans and priorities. And, when companies can do this, the entire industry benefits. “It’s about growing the businesses behind business aviation to become more stable, more adaptive, while also business aviation as a whole becomes adaptive and more sustainable,” Gordon says.

A willingness to advocate publicly around potentially divisive topics may not automatically improve a business’s ability to weather any particular storm—but individuals and companies willing to take the initiative are likely to end up better placed, Gordon suggests. Just as important is another attribute unlikely to feature on balance sheets but which is often a critical ingredient found in the strongest companies: kindness.

“You’d love people to speak out, but I do appreciate everybody has their own business and they’ve got a team and they don’t want to lose their team for being outspoken,” she says. “But it doesn’t mean you can’t continue progressively improving—not just your business but the sustainability, the efficiencies within that business, being ethical, being kind. And I would say most of the people that I know in business aviation are actually kind. It’s not necessarily a business model, but it helps.”