Major airlines are cutting back flights as oil prices soar. Continental Airlines was the latest in a string of airlines to announce layoffs, flight cuts and the retirement of older, fuel-guzzling airplanes. The result is likely higher fares and fewer choices, more waiting, less service.
That could be good for the sale of business jets. The more expensive, complicated and troublesome it is to fly the airlines, the more business jet travel becomes attractive and cost effective for corporations and others with the billfolds to buy them. Business jet deliveries have been at record highs. More than half of the sales are coming from international customers.
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Yeah, and it could be good for buying horses and train tickets, too! If the average American is priced out of flying AND driving, then horses and trains may be all that’s left to us if want to travel any distance! Good grief.
And motorcyles, motor scooters and bicycles. Funny thing … the big jet airplane manufacturers are now trying to build even bigger airplanes.
Perhaps China with 1.3 billion people is buying. Its my understanding that Chinese technicians are all over the world exploring for oil.
Reminds me of the theory by some historians that Japan inadvertently started WWII in 1941 in an expanded search for more petroleum for their growing industries.
We can’t stop progress even if we don’t like it. the wealthy run the economics of this world. If they want more business jets, that’s fine. It won’t make a huge dent in the commercial market anyway – I mean who do you fly with? Big business flies their execs on business jets most of the time already. the mid-level managers are still going to be flying in the cheapo seats on airliners, there is no way these companies can justify sending their low-paid help on a business jet that costs thousands of dollars per hour to operate. Its not a big deal to the average consumer.
The real problem is that gas prices are going up and so are fares on comercial airlines. Business jet sales will not change that. It’s a simple supply and demand issue, like everything else in the economy.
There is a major point missed here. It is not just sales of business jets that will benefit from the airline cutback, it is also turboprops and piston airplanes, new and used. All of General Aviation will benefit. Business leaders are discovering that General Aviation is a valuable business tool and not all that expensive.