Corporate Jet Investor London 2018 – Day One

If you ever needed a sign that 2018 would be the year for business aviation to recover unequivocally, then you need look no further than the first day of CJI’s 2018 London conference.

The day opened, as it usually does, with a poll, gauging the delegates’ confidence in the industry for the coming year.

With 550 business aviation professionals, drawn from a wide spectrum of different company types voting, it follows that they would vote based on the outlook for their own sectors.

Despite this, a combined 95% of people are either slightly confident or very confident about 2018. We ran the same poll during our 2017 conference, where 86% of people showed confidence in the year.

Polling people can be an effective way of gauging opinion, but the theme of confidence was continued throughout the day.

Chad Anderson, president of aircraft broker Jetcraft, talked through his company’s latest forecast, with the fleet growing steadily over the next 10 years.

This way followed up by fellow broker Brian Proctor from Mente Group, who finished his talk with an emphatic: “There has never been a better time to buy an aircraft”.

This all helped the mood at the conference, and much of the discussions during breaks and lunch were about increases in the number of aircraft movements and an increase in charter-passenger numbers.

Although it might be foolhardy to predict the mood of a conference at the halfway point, we are willing to stick out our necks here and say that the smiles during the cocktails parties will not only be because of the drinks.

Enjoy the rest of the conference.

Alud

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