The Brazilian general aviation fleet grew more slowly and flew less in 2014, with growth moving toward the country’s central-west region, according to the fifth edition of ABAG’s Brazilian Yearbook of General Aviation, issued here at LABACE 2015. The 2014 fleet of 15,120 aircraft represents a 3.2 percent increase from the prior year, the lowest growth rate since 2007, and despite including more aircraft, the 686,000 operations performed by general aviation in 2014 at the country’s 33 largest airports, represent a 7 percent drop from 2013.

The Yearbook calculates the total value of the GA fleet at $12.749 billion, up 3.1 percent from 2013, with twinjets composing the largest share by value, 35 percent. The fleet has an average age of 20 years, although helicopters average 13 years with 29 percent in the 1-5 year range, and jets average 14 years, with 55 percent being less than 10 years old.

The Yearbook, which is heavily illustrated with graphs and charts and available in print, as well as on a thumb drive or in the Apple Store, has since last year’s edition included information on the value of the fleet and general aviation’s contribution to the economy. Its statistical portrait of Brazilian general aviation and where and why it flies shows some contraction and some shift in growth that carries apparent contradictions.

The instructional fleet had the highest percentage of growth, adding 96 new aircraft in 2014, but for the second year in a row represented the greatest reduction in operations, with almost 32,000 fewer flights than in 2013. In the central-west region, instruction’s 17 percent growth was the highest of any category, maintaining a growth trend uninterrupted since 2012.

The 3.2 percent growth in the country’s fleet is a net change of 472 aircraft, with 184 new and 398 used aircraft added and two changing usage to GA for a total of 584 additions, less 112 canceled registrations. Over the past decade almost 5,000 aircraft were added, a cumulative increase of 45.5percent.

Regional Trends

The southeast region’s GA fleet represents 42 percent of Brazil’s total, 27 percent being in São Paulo alone. However, the region’s fleet grew only by 2 percent in 2014. The central west’s 22 percent share of the country’s fleet makes it the second-largest region. It grew 5 percent with 166 new aircraft, its jet fleet growing 14 percent and its helicopter fleet by 13 percent. The southern region, which is the third largest, also grew by 5 percent, adding 122 aircraft, jets growing 14 percent over the prior year, followed by helicopters with 13 percent.

Air Taxi

Air taxis were the only category where the fleet shrunk, dropping 16 percent over the past two years. It is the only usage category where most of the fleet (52 percent) is twin-engine, but since 2013 the twin-engine segment of the fleet declined 5 percent, compared to a 3 percent drop for the number of single-engine aircraft. The air taxi category grew in only one region, the northeast, in 2014.

Private Air Services

The sector with the largest numerical increase in 2014 was “private air service,” adding 353 aircraft. It was also the only category to increase the number of flights, accounting for 47 percent of GA operations. The private-air-services fleet grew by 4 percent in the northern region, and again with 4 percent led in the northeast, and while trailing instruction’s growth in the central west, it still represented 73 percent of the region’s fleet.

Campo de Marte

While São Paulo’s Campo de Marte airport remained the country’s busiest general aviation airport, both in operations and in airfields connected, movements declined from 152,711 in 2012 to 137,314 in 2013, and dropped a further 11.7 percent to 121,229 in 2014. Figures from DECEA (the Brazilian Air Force’s Department of Airspace Control) show that June and July, the months of the soccer World Cup tournament, were significantly lower than other months, reflecting security restrictions. Only January and February showed improvement from 2013, when those months were notoriously rainy, while December, without rain and without the World Cup but in the grip of the current economic crisis, was 21 percent below December 2013.

DECEA’s New Almanac

In June DECEA issued its first Air Traffic Statistical Yearbook, covering the same 33 airports analyzed in the ABAG Yearbook. The data includes commercial and military as well as general aviation information, and is broken out by hour of the day and day of the week, and summarized by terminal areas and the five national Flight Information Regions.

The air force notes a 2 percent drop in total aviation movements compared to 2013, but ascribes this to security restrictions imposed for the 2014 World Cup, which took place in June and July. For July the Air Force showed that general aviation jumped 73 percent from the year before. The airport that showed the greatest growth in movement, Joinville, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, had 28.0 percent more movements, pushed up by a GA increase of 40.7 percent, to a total of 9,670 GA movements for the year. The DECEA Yearbook is available (in Portuguese only) at: http://issuu.com/aeroespaco/docs/anuario_2014_def_internet_.

While ABAG’s Brazilian Yearbook of General Aviation’s movement data is derived from DECEA’s database, it was only after four years of the ABAG Yearbook’s success that the DECEA published its own summary. Raw data is not released. The ABAG Yearbook joins the movement information to data from civil aviation agency ANAC’s aircraft registry, market information and other sources, and includes analysis that, since the first edition, has made it an important reference for private and public decision makers for the Brazilian aviation industry.