The business aviation industry finished last year on a mainly positive note, according to Global Jet Capital (GJC), which remains broadly optimistic about prospects for 2024 in its latest assessment of the market. However, according to the finance and leasing group's just published Q4 Business Aviation Market Brief, 2023 did not measure up to the rapid expansion that took place in 2021 and 2022, as “flight operations and transactions declined while inventory increased and values softened.”

During the fourth quarter of last year, GJC reported business aircraft flight operations declining by 0.9 percent year over year. That said, while operations were lower in the U.S. and Europe, elsewhere they climbed, "demonstrating strong global demand for business aviation.” Those numbers, however, are still higher than pre-Covid levels, up 17 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2019 and up 15.1 percent for 2023 compared with full-year 2019.

“It was widely expected that many of the new users of business aviation would return to commercial airlines as the world normalized,” the company said. “However, due to the industry’s inherent value proposition—including personal safety, flexibility, productivity, and comfort—a substantial proportion of new users continued to utilize business aviation in 2023, demonstrating a systemic expansion of the user base.”

On the manufacturing side, compared with the fourth quarter of 2022, OEM backlogs were up 1.7 percent in the final quarter of 2023, reaching $41 billion (not including Dassault and Embraer), according to GJC. While these were lower than the high levels seen in late 2021 and early 2022, they were in line with the last three months of 2022 and pre-Covid levels. "Stable orders and the inability to increase production [due to supply chain and labor problems] resulted in a book-to-bill ratio of 1-to-1 in Q4, and OEMs expect book-to-bill ratios to remain around 1-to-1 in 2024,” the report stated.

According to GJC, growth may slow in 2024, due to “wars in Ukraine and Israel, relatively high interest rates (despite plans by many central banks to reduce them in 2024), continued de-globalization and trade conflicts, major elections in countries making up 38.1 percent of global GDP, structural growth challenges in China, and disruptions in Europe...”