Business jet flying isn’t just for the C-suite or senior leadership anymore, as private aircraft owners and operators are pivoting during the COVID-19 pandemic to fly an increasingly wide range of passengers. It’s driven by ongoing infection concerns, commercial airline route and frequency reductions, and the need to keep crews current and proficient during the demand downturn.
This “bizjet boom” has generated a variety of ripple effects across aviation, so we sat down with Edward Bolen, president and chief executive officer at the National Business Aviation Association, made up of over 11,000 member companies, for a strategic perspective on the last 18 months in private aviation, and where the industry is headed in the future.
“While NBAA doesn’t keep data on use of specific airports by our 11,000 member companies, we’ve heard anecdotally that mission profiles for some companies did indeed change, particularly when it came to secondary or tertiary markets,” Bolen explains.
In this sort of instance, staff might have previously travelled to these smaller cities via commercial flights, but when these services were reduced or cut entirely, company jets stepped in to bridge the gap. Employees had previously travelled to these locations via regular scheduled airline service, but needed additional options when commercial flights were dramatically curtailed or eliminated to smaller communities.
Further driving growth in some areas of demand during the pandemic, Bolen says, “Companies that continued to utilise business aircraft during the pandemic did so in recognition of the degree to which they could control the level of personal safety to those onboard, including through enhanced cabin sanitisation measures and greater social distancing offered by using fixed base operations.”
“At the same time,” he explains, “it’s noteworthy that many companies also adopted new mission profiles during the pandemic, including those with passengers or employees onboard who had not previously utilised the company aircraft — as one example, mid-level managers tasked with reestablishing company operations at locations impacted by the pandemic.”
New business models like VistaJet’s Dynamic Corporate Membership offering have also been increasing flexibility and creating pandemic-specific experience elements like cabin crew assigned to specific client company trips.
At the same time, some owners and operators saw demand dropping, with FAA statistics pointing to more than a 20% year-on-year reduction [Business Jet Report: Jan ’21 Issue PDF]. Some NBAA members made the most of downtime to schedule maintenance and upgrade work or bring operations manuals and other documentation up to date.
“In many cases, maintenance crews and flight operations also worked with their companies on ways to keep crews focused and aircraft flying, even on a reduced schedule, by performing additional in-aircraft training or operating missions in support of charitable or humanitarian activities,” Bolen says. “This included transporting vital supplies and personal protective equipment, or transporting patients to medical treatment through organisations like Corporate Angel Network,” a US-based organisation that transports cancer patients and bone marrow or stem cell donors to receive medical care, especially where airline access is minimal or nonexistent.
Once in the air, the industry has seen a strong trend of “podding” teams working on aircraft: reconfiguring staff structures to separate pilot, cabin crew and maintenance teams into different and distanced teams in order to improve physical distancing and reduce cross-infection risk.
Perhaps surprisingly, the reduction in regular overhead noise made the operations that remained stand out more in terms of noise. As a result, Bolen says, “NBAA has placed even greater emphasis on our ‘Fly Quiet’ initiative during the pandemic, encouraging flight crews to follow recommended noise abatement procedures and work with their home airports to ensure the best solutions for adherence to quiet-flying guidelines.”
As elsewhere in the industry, maintaining currency — and even more importantly, proficiency — in skills across specialisms [Embry-Riddle Report PDF] was a key challenge posed by the COVID-19 demand downturn.
In addition to the addition of training and charitable operations, Bolen says that “we also saw several flight operations bring aspects of their company training programs in-house, and often in-aircraft, as simulator-based training declined initially due to social distancing concerns.”
Bolen is full of praise for the industry pulling together during the pandemic, which he says led drove a “significant increase in the levels of information, safety data and best practices shared among flight operations. I believe the pandemic served to further unite business aviation in a spirit of innovation and shared purpose.”
Indeed, NBAA’s Business Aviation Management Committee itself produced a best-practice resource early in the pandemic, recommending measures including pre-flight risk analysis, passenger and crewmember safety protocols, and the use of a variety of procedure and recommendations documents, while the organisation has also created advice for safer COVID operations in everything from sanitisation to onboard catering.
Events like the February 2021 virtual Flight Operations Conference include best practice from experts like the flight department at Johnson & Johnson and remote medical specialists Medaire.
Bolen highlights a wide variety of new cleanliness and sanitisation work, new products and protocols including UV disinfection equipment, ionising machines and anti-microbial cleaning solutions — all of which needed to be certified as safe to use on the highly engineered materials that make up aircraft cabins.
“I expect several safety protocols adopted during the pandemic will continue, even as we emerge from COVID-19,” Bolen says, “and we’ll also see a continued focus on data-sharing, and openness about safety-related factors, going forward.”
New technologies will also play a key part in the continuing drive to more efficient and ever-safer operations, including Corporate Flight Operations Quality Assurance (C-FOQA) programmes, the FAA’s Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) system, and others.
“At the root of these and other initiatives is the spirit of innovation that has always defined our industry,” Bolen concludes. “Perhaps one of the best examples of business aviation’s resilience in the face of COVID-19 is that the pace of development on current and future solutions to make our industry safer, more secure, more efficient and more sustainable did not wane during the pandemic — if anything, they increased, and I expect to see many exciting results from these ongoing efforts in the years to come.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 12th August 2021
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With many believing the pandemic has been a catalyst for the aviation industry pulling together – sharing information, safety data and best practices – what has been your experience of the industry uniting during these testing times? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this…
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