Boeing Business Jets (BBJ, Pavilion A21-24) lands at the Dubai Airshow on the heels of October’s announcement of two BBJ 787-9 Dreamliners orders from a single, undisclosed customer. The purchase contract, placed in August, is worth $564 million at list price, bringing orders for the executive variant of the composite widebody to 16. 

“The BBJ 787 program has won over other government and private customers who want to work, rest, and arrive refresh and ready for a productive day,” said Ihssane Mounir, Boeing senior v-p of commercial sales and marketing. The BBJ 787 “offers our most discerning customers the ability to travel in ultimate comfort and fly directly to just about any city on earth,” he added. “We’re talking about London to Sydney or Tokyo to Cape Town,” given its 9,485 nm range.

The Middle East is a vital market for VIP airliners, accounting for almost one-third (29 percent) of all BBJ purchases and more than half (52 percent) of the BBJ’s widebody sales, company head Greg Laxton said at Dubai’s MEBAA gathering last December, when the company introduced the BBJ 777X, the newest member of its family. The addition complemented the BBJ Max, the VIP version of the 737 Max, the first of which was delivered to a Comlux Completion for outfitting last December, as well. But since then the grounding of the Max and a delay in the 777X certification efforts have affected Boeing’s VIP business in parallel with its commercial side. 

Richard Gaona, founder and chairman of Comlux Group, whose U.S. completion facility is performing the first BBJ Max outfitting, said, “Nobody knows when we’ll be able to fly. Once you have a delivery [program] that has stopped, the completion market is affected.”

Wieland Timm, senior director VIP and special mission aircraft at BBJ and Airbus Corporate Jets authorized completion specialist Lufthansa Technik, said, “A lot of our industry is in shock with the Max. The information given to us is very limited, and currently nobody can work on their Max projects.”

Once returned to service, Timm is optimistic that four to six new Maxs and a similar number of A320neos will enter the completion market annually.

Meanwhile, B777X certification was delayed due to a failure of a cargo door during the final stages of certification tests, stalling the BBJ version’s service entry, initially scheduled for availability in the first quarter of 2021.