Why This Month‘s Bizjet Meetup Matters

The coming NBAA convention is shaping up to be the 500-knot canary in the coal mine, and why it’s likely to give us a good idea of where the industry is headed.

With the NBAA convention coming up in a couple of weeks, it's a good time to lay out the kinds of things we might expect to discover, and some of them are bigger than any one announcement, however blockbuster it might be.

For those of you who aren't familiar, the National Business Aviation Association Convention is the biggest business aviation event in the world, and it's not even a close contest. There are only two convention centers in the United States right now with grand halls big enough to host the event, Las Vegas and Orlando, and so the convention goes back and forth between those two very different and very similar cities ever other year.

The "blockbuster" reference in mentioning announcements common at the show was no overstatement. It's hard to think of a big jet airplane program in the past 25 years that hasn't been launched or otherwise premiered at NBAA. This year will there be any such big announcement? We don't know yet. Companies work really hard to keep such things a secret. I remember one year seeing friends from Cessna Aircraft at breakfast the first day of the show and they were all sporting little logo pins of a horse. It was, of course, the day the company launched the Mustang. This year I have an idea of who might be making new airplane announcements, but it's just speculation and rumor at this stage, so you'll have to wait too.

It's also no understatement to say that this year's show will reveal a lot about the confidence manufacturers have in the market. It is important to understand that every program that gets announced, or that we don't hear about, were based on decisions made at least 18 months ago. In the case of the big guns, like Gulfstream and Dassault, it's probable that new airplane program decisions were reached at least 5 years ago, in some cases maybe even more.

So for those programs, the economy is a sideshow. These companies figure that they'll surf the ups and downs of Wall Street and that in the long run their programs will succeed or fail on their own merits. In the case of Gulfstream, we can leave out the failure part.

For the rest of the show, plans we hear about, or not, will tell the tale of just how much investment these companies are betting will be smart given the outlook. On the Sunday before the show starts, industry biggie Honeywell shares with reporters its market forecast, which uses reams of data to come up with a picture of what the next 5, 10 and 20 years will look like in aviation.

Their findings are always the same. Up and up over time. It's how we get to that big growth place that remains the question. What will this year look like, and next year? Certainly aviation doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the political events here and abroad could have a big impact. The convention will take place just days before the United States Presidential election on November 8th. You can bet that there will plenty of talk of that election, and even more talk of what it might mean for the industry.

A commercial pilot, editor-in-Chief Isabel Goyer has been flying for more than 40 years, with hundreds of different aircraft in her logbook and thousands of hours. An award-winning aviation writer, photographer and editor, Ms. Goyer led teams at Sport Pilot, Air Progress and Flying before coming to Plane & Pilot in 2015.

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