PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - PSA: Private aviation is booming right now
Old 5th Sep 2020, 23:20
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PilotLZ
 
Join Date: Aug 2016
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According to the Eurocontrol periodic reports on the traffic situation in Europe, business jet flights have reached their pre-COVID number week-on-week and have exceeded it by 2%. The only sector doing better is cargo, with a 12% increase in flight numbers week-on-week, as compared to August 2019.

Those are the numbers on a pan-European scale. The question is, can their distribution help you? While some corporate charter companies are booming right now and doing double the amount of flights from last year, the relatively small overall increase likely means that other players are out of business. Whether they are charter outfits with poor marketing and cost management or owners looking to trim non-essential expenditure remains to be seen. The second half of the question is, how sustainable is this trend going to be in the long-term run? Is it going to stay that way when social distancing is no longer a thing or when more airline flights become available? On a similar note, is the cargo trend going to stay when the number of airline flights goes further up and availability of belly cargo capacity improves?

It's a pretty opportunistic thing even in the best of times, let alone now. I know people who got jobs in growing charter companies in the past months. I know others who got jobs with new owners who found a cheap aircraft being sold by someone less fortunate and said to themselves "why not". However, there are likely others in the sector who lost their jobs - and the fact that I don't know anyone of them doesn't mean that they do not exist. So, as with any other walk of life, it's largely a matter of the right time, right place and right contacts (of course, combined with the right skills, attitude, conduct and appearance).
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