As the business aviation industry continues to recover from the post-Covid era, the major forecasts are seeing growth ahead for the industry. Yet some near-term hurdles forced a slight downgrade in the predicted yearly delivery totals from the OEMs.

“We have adjusted our JetNet iQ business jet delivery forecast downwards for the year 2024 to reflect slower-than-planned [Gulfstream] G700 shipments and the strike impacting Textron Aviation,” said Rolland Vincent, president of Rolland Vincent Associates and founder/director of JetNet iQ. “Together, we estimate that a total of 33 jets will now slip out of 2024 and into the next. Whereas we had been predicting an 11% year-over-year increase in jet shipments in 2024, we now estimate that jet shipments will be approximately 775 units.”

That total—the highest amount since pre-Covid 2019—still represents a 6% increase over 2023’s 730 jet deliveries across the entire spectrum, ranging from light jets all the way to bizliners, Vincent noted.

“If there is 'good news' out of these shipment delays, it is that we believe the outlook for 2025 has improved—we have bolstered next year’s shipments as we do not believe that these delays are causing customers to cancel their orders,” he told AIN. All the major OEMs are expected to finish the year with book-to-bill ratios at or above 1:1.

While the supply chain issues that plagued the airframer's assembly lines over the past several years are easing, they are still not entirely resolved—a situation that continues to temper the pace of production.

“We were a little hampered between 2020 and 2023 because of supply chain constraints,” said Kevin Schwab, a systems engineer with Honeywell and lead analyst on the company’s recently released annual business jet operators survey. “We’re seeing some improvements in the supply chain, and that is enabling the OEMs to have these production rate increases.”

Ron Epstein, a managing director with Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research, noted that the situation is not just limited to business aviation. “It’s not just this industry; the entire aerospace and defense industry is constrained,” he said. “You have an industry that is constrained from a labor point of view, and you’ve got multiple constraints in the supply chain, so I guess the good news is nobody can overproduce.”

It is that situation that led the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) to issue its Aerospace Supply Chain Resiliency Task Force Report to Congress last month. The report determined that, among other factors, the U.S. aerospace supply chain “is vulnerable to labor shortages, obstacles in critical materials, and the health of supporting infrastructure,” adding, “Investment in these three areas, well beyond today’s current levels, will be needed to ensure that the aerospace supply chain is able to operate in the presence of supply chain disruptions.”

The report noted that while global workforce shortages have been on the horizon for decades, the Covid-19 pandemic, the “great resignation,” a constantly expanding industry, economic cycles that encourage early retirement, and retention challenges have served to exacerbate workforce issues, leading to pressure throughout the supply chain.

“For us in Germany, it’s not necessarily labor,” said Frank Moesta, senior v-p of strategy and future programs with Rolls-Royce Deutschland. “We have got the mechanics; we have got the equipment; it’s just when you can’t get parts, you can’t build engines.”

Despite, or as a result of, these headwinds, Vincent noted that the industry backlog has stood at approximately $50 billion for the past three years. “We’re not clearing out the backlog, but the good news is the backlog is holding,” he stated.

In the third-quarter JetNet iQ survey, Vincent noted a great deal of pessimism among its recipients, with the industry’s net optimism score the lowest since the start of the Covid pandemic in Q2 2020. North America had led the plunge, likely due to pre-election jitters in the U.S. Based on the survey’s historical data, uncertainty was seen in the third quarter in each of the past two election years but rebounded after the election results were certified.

For this year’s annual 10-year forecast, JetNet predicts deliveries of 8,600 business jets worth a total of $262 billion. In the same decade outlook, the forecast added 4,300 turboprops at $25 billion through 2033.

Honeywell Aerospace’s latest forecast, released in October at the start of NBAA-BACE, was slightly more conservative, calling for the delivery of 8,500 new business jets worth $280 billion over the next decade and cracking the 900-units-a-year delivery threshold for the first time since 2008 at the tail end of the forecast window.

“The business aviation industry is in a prolonged period of healthy growth, and we don’t see that positive trend changing any time soon,” said Heath Patrick, Honeywell Aerospace Technologies’ president for the Americas aftermarket. “Business aviation continues to see more users and, as a result, manufacturers are ramping up production to keep pace with growing demand, a trend we expect to continue for the foreseeable future.”

Next year, the company predicts 16% more business jet deliveries than in pre-Covid 2019. Over the next half decade, Honeywell’s survey anticipates that large-cabin jets will account for one-third of the delivery total and two-thirds of the total revenue value.

In terms of where deliveries are anticipated over the next five years, North America is expected to receive two-thirds of the total, followed by 13% to Europe, 10% to Latin America, 7% to Asia Pacific, and the remaining 3% to the Middle East.

While the preowned aircraft market has cooled somewhat since the record low inventories of 2021 and 2022, Honeywell noted that used jet values remain strong compared with those of the previous decade. The report predicted that while the inventory should continue to slowly rise, prices should remain stable. Operators in the survey noted that they expect to rely more heavily on the preowned market to expand their fleets than in previous years.

Vincent noted continued stabilization in the preowned jet market as some young aircraft have begun to appear on the market for the first time in several years. “The market is moving, and it’s normalizing back up to 7 to 8% of the fleet [availability],” he said. “We want to start seeing numbers like that because with two-year backlogs, [preowned] is another way to get people into the industry.”