Flight Friday: Recovery And Growth In Business Aviation

With the upcoming EBACE event, this week’s Flight Friday looks at the recovery and growth of the business aviation market.

Business aviation has been a “good news” story post-pandemic. With commercial passenger flying nearly coming to a standstill in 2020, those people—who had the means and need to travel, especially in the domestic U.S.—turned to business aviation to fill their needs. The business aviation market is dominated by the North American market, with North American operators accounting for over 70% of all flight in 2023.

After the pandemic outbreak, the smaller aircraft picked up their utilization rapidly, and by the end of 2020, the sector’s small jets and turboprops had returned to utilization that was at or above the equivalent month in 2019. Small jet and multi-engine turboprop utilization continued to grow through to the end of 2022, before slightly softening, and plateauing during 2023.

Recently, small jet utilization is up 20% on 2019 levels, with multi-engine turboprops still up 15%. Single-engine turboprops continue to go from strength to strength. The utilization in this segment is currently almost 50% greater than the equivalent month in 2019. This is, in part, to the continued delivery of these aircraft, which offer lower operating costs and can fill in most of the roles that the legacy multi-engine turboprops and small jets can do.

Medium and large jets recovery reflect the small jets, but with a time lag. It was March 2021 before the medium jets returned to equivalent 2019 utilization, as countries slowly started removing travel restrictions and longer flights were required. The large jets took until June 2021 to return to 100% levels. Again, both segments peaked, softened, and then plateaued. Medium jets are still 20% higher than 2019, with the large jets 10% higher.

This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.