With the 2023 European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition (EBACE) coming up, this week’s #FlightFriday looks at how European operated business jets and turboprops have been utilized since the start of 2020.

When indexed to the equivalent month in 2019, the data shows that soon after the COVID outbreak, the small jets and turboprops had returned, in fact exceeded, 2019 utilization levels by July 2020. It took until May and July 2021 for medium and large jets respectively to return to equivalent month 2019 utilization levels.

The business aviation sector has been one of the few bright stars of the pandemic, and we have seen some of that utilization begin to fall and then plateau over the last 6-9 months. Whilst it’s not good news that the utilization has dropped, the large and medium jets are still 12% higher than 2019 levels, small jets and muti-engine turboprops are around 25% higher, and single-engine turboprops are 60% higher.

The single-engine turboprop numbers are helped with the growing number of aircraft being delivered into the sector, and the multi-engine turboprops are inversely affected with the slowing number of twins being delivered.

Whilst the business aviation bubble hasn’t exactly ‘popped’, some of the air has been let out, but there’s still enough left in there to keep it in a better position than 2019.

This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.