Las Vegas – If it weren’t for the Chinese, the 64th annual meeting of the National Business Aviation Association here might have been called for lack of customer interest.
The Chinese appeared to be the only ones announcing orders for business jets so far at this year’s show. In fact, the two orders on the opening day of the NBAA convention Monday came from the same aircraft leasing firm, Minsheng Financial Leasing Co., one for 13 Legacy 650s from Brazil’s Embraer and another for Dassault Falcons from France’s Dassault Aviation.
Montreal’s Bombardier Inc. contented itself with announcing seven new suppliers for its Global 7000 and 8000 models that are beginning their development phase.
To be fair to Bombardier, though, it stole the show at last year’s NBAA meeting in Atlanta with the $1-billion launch of the Global 7000 and 8000 models, the top of the line in private aviation in terms of cost, upwards of $60 million per jet, range of up to 7,900 nautical miles, and luxury.
Perhaps of most interest to attendees of a morning technical briefing was the fact that the windows on the sumptuous future planes will be 80 per cent bigger than on the current Global 5000 and 6000.
Bassam Sabbagh, vice-president and GM of the Global 7000 and 8000, due out in 2016 and 2017 respectively, assured questioners that the bigger windows might be retrofitted on Global 5000s and 6000s.
One analyst, David Tyerman of Toronto brokerage Canaccord Genuity, said that Bombardier has been a bit slow off the mark to market its planes in emerging economies, notably in the so-called BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China. But Tyerman noted that Bombardier is correcting that now, making a concerted effort to establish a serious local presence and sales force in those countries, most particularly in China.
Business aircraft manufacturers all said in the last two days that the recovery in their industry that was widely expected to take hold in 2012 will probably be pushed back further after the recent roiling of global markets.
Before the 2008 crash, Bombardier and the other five major players in that business, Dassault, Embraer, Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., Hawker Beechcraft and Cessna Aircraft Corp., were flying high for the most part. Since then, high-end jets like Bombardier’s Global line and Gulfstream’s G650, a rival to Bombardier’s Global 6000, 7000 and 8000, have resumed growth while lower end jets have not.
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