Officials from a Switzerland-based provider of technology for optimizing the time and money owners and operators spend on their business aircraft expressed a bullish outlook to AIN this week on the industry’s prospects once the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic has passed. MySky co-founder and global strategy director Christopher Marich said none of his company’s clients—owner/operators, aircraft management firms, and corporate flight departments in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas—are selling their aircraft or canceling their subscriptions to his company’s services. In fact, MySky expanded its business 60 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same period a year ago.
“Although the skies are very quiet right now, I think there’s much less of a panic than we saw in 2008,” Marich said. “We see that people want to keep [business aircraft] and want to keep them ready for when they’re allowed to fly again.”
Based on their own observations and conversations with clients, Marich and MySky head of Americas Jean De Looz said they expect an increase in business aircraft utilization as more corporate department heads seek to put their employees on the company’s business jet instead of on an airliner. “We’ve had chief pilots tell us essentially that the internal budgets they’ve set as companies are not sufficient to fly individual departments around that need aircraft,” De Looz said. “So the flight departments [will] have long lines now of internal stakeholders that want to use the business jet that they didn’t have before.”
Marich said he expects to see an initial surge of business aircraft use because it will take airlines longer to spool up their parked aircraft. But that won’t be a short-lived trend, they said, because companies will want to protect the health of their employees. Furthermore, De Looz thinks demand for more corporate flying will cause those companies to look at their fleets and determine if the aircraft they have on hand is sufficient for demand, which could lead to the purchase of additional aircraft. “We’re definitely hearing that from a lot of flight departments that are on our platform,” he added.
Noting that business aircraft transactions had fallen only by low double-digits in March and the percentage of the active global fleet for sale was even lower, Marich said he thinks he has reason to be optimistic about business aviation’s future. “Maybe we’re too optimistic, but we see a lot of indicators that tend to be quite positive for our industry,” he said.
