How The One Percent Travel in Private Jets, Second Aircraft Joins Falcon 8X Test Fleet, Embraer Delivers 100th Phenom, China, Private Jets and Business Jet Market

How the one percent travel: American men take the most flights aboard private jets while Moscow to Nice is the busiest route

More than 8 in 10 passengers are men with most aged 40 to 55

America dominates private flight market with 60 percent of flights

Europe has second largest share with Russia enjoying large share

Businessman opting for convenient transport to close big deals

It’s a privilege reserved for a lucky few but now experts have revealed exactly who is getting on board when it comes to private jets.

The spotlight has been shone on the industry’s latest marketing statistics – identifying Americans as the most frequent flyers while the busiest route is between Moscow and Nice.

Billionaire entrepreneurs, chief executives, and A-list celebrities are amongst the exclusive clientele, found to be 80 per cent men.

Aviation provider NetJets – which has the largest private jet fleet in the world – announced the findings of the annual report for 2013.

Users of the luxury crafts, which often boast private bedrooms, fine-dining facilities, and the odd cinema, are typically private entrepreneurs, aged between 40 and 55.

The aircraft provider said the United States remains the world’s leading private jet market with 60 per cent of global traffic starting and ending there.

Popular routes include Moscow to Côte d’Azur, Miami to New York, New York to Los Angeles, New York to West Palm Beach and London to New York in the most recent data.

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Politics To Determine China Business Jet Sales Revival

Compared with most of the aerospace and aviation industry, business aviation is not very political. While other sub-sectors struggle with political influence even when a government is not the buyer, business jet makers mostly sell their products in deals too small to attract attention, a bit like the car industry. And their customers’ use of the aircraft is, for the most part, a purely private matter.

Well, that is not true in China just now, where politics are front and center for business aviation. Probably the biggest question here for manufacturers is how long Beijing will maintain an anti-corruption drive that has frightened rich Chinese away from private jets flying. When showing off a jet is no longer asking to be investigated, the theory goes, the buyers will come back.

The campaign is also hitting industry through the Chinese economy, geared as it is to corrupt ways of doing things. That is undermining the confidence of potential buyers who are not fearful of investigation. But economics should have been a quite secondary factor in last year’s decline in Chinese demand for business aircraft. Gross domestic product is, after all, still expanding at about 7% a year, so there should be a good deal more money available for buying private jets, not less.

Business Jet Market Shows Faint Signs Of Recovery In China

There are plenty of billionaires in China, but increasingly their business aircraft are not. Last year’s trend to register private jets away from mainland China is continuing this year, say industry officials, reinforced by the growing habit of not seeking a local domicile for new aircraft.

These measures are probably helping the faint improvement in demand that some people in the industry are reporting for recent months. Still the companies that make business aircraft are dealing with a market that once presented an astounding opportunity but last year ran into the brick wall of China’s anti-corruption crackdown.

Airbus figures for the number of billionaires in the growth markets of China, Russia and the Middle East illustrate well just how big that opportunity should be. By 2017, China should have almost as many billionaires as the U.S., Airbus says, relying on studies by Ledbury Research. At the same time, China has about 2% of the business aircraft that are registered in the U.S.  Importantly, the number of China’s billionaires has been multiplying much faster than for the Middle East and Russia. And the 2017 forecast number for China of 1,040 is 4-5 times higher than for the other two regions (see graph).