By Rick Adams, FRAeS
The European Business Aviation Association (EBAA) took its first solo flight last week, staging the annual European Business Aviation Conference and Exhibition (EBACE) at Palexpo in Geneva, Switzerland without its longtime partner, the US-based National Business Aviation Association (NBAA).
The split was amicable, Doug Carr told me, as evidenced by his appearance as a speaker in one of the more than 30 presentations across three ‘stages’ embedded around the exhibit floor across 2 ½ days. Carr is NBAA SVP for Safety, Security, Sustainability and International Operations.
“Taking over the show was… challenging,” admitted Holger Krahmer to a media gathering on the eve of the event. Krahmer is Secretary General of the not-for-profit EBAA. He promised “a completely new look and feel, a lot of new ideas, a new concept.”
One new concept was pod-like presentation stages, themed for ‘AirOps,’ ‘Flight Daily News’ and ‘Innovation and Sustainability,’ offering, generally, multi-speaker roundtables of industry executives questioned by a moderator. Topics ranged from emerging mobility markets, compliance with ReFuelEU, airport access (always a bizav bane), ground handling, impact of female leaders, air charter training, conflict zones, cybersecurity, and promoting inclusion and diversity.
Economic Turbulence
Dominating the discussions were recent and future actions of the new US administration. The words “tariffs” and “uncertainty” were heard frequently.
“Aircraft buyers are more restrained to make the next deal,” noted Krahmer. The US administration “is unpredictable in how they act, provoking long-standing strategic partners on a daily basis. Shin kicks to the Europeans, to the Canadians. This is an uncertain world and it will come away with consequences and effects on the economy. A lot of companies and businesses are holding back investments.”
“We are in a very uncertain period,” added Oliver King, CEO of Avinode. “But I would say that doesn’t make it a negative business environment for us as an industry. I’m cautiously optimistic.”
Jetcraft Senior VP Sales Pascal Bachmann highlighted one encouraging demographic change: “In the last 10 years, buyers below age 45 have doubled. Globally, we sell 29% of our aircraft to people below the age of 45. It’s actually a higher percentage in Africa and in the Middle East.”
“You have younger generations who really understand why it’s needed as a business tool. They start on a small plane and pretty soon they see that they need to travel everywhere in a bigger plane. So the market is there. It might be slow, but it’s there.”
“And the younger buyers asked for SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel)?” asked moderator Mike Stones of Corporate Jet Investor.
“No. I’m sorry,” admitted Bachmann. “I say something here that I probably regret… but maybe we have some solutions which are actually bad solutions to a problem we don’t have. I know it’s an unpopular opinion right now. I regret that we live in a world where, to an extent, we cannot say what we think anymore because we’re going to be burned at the stake if we do. But I think if we want to save our industry, we need to look reality in the face.”
Turning to cost issues, Avinode’s King said, “Think what France has done in the introduction of the luxury tax; what did that do to pricing? Unsurprisingly, the pricing jumped by the amount of the tax. Demand – unchanged. So the French government learned that they could take in a cool billion euros without really any impact upon us, because demand is essentially inelastic.”
Tariff Impacts
Over at the Innovation Stage, the focus was on the practical impacts of dealing with the new US tariffs.
“In a duty-free, tariff-free environment, you really didn’t have to worry about too much as long as you had everything documented properly. Now, with tariffs, it’s a different situation,” explained Tobias Kleitman, President and Founder, TVPX. “If the country of manufacture is non-US, now you have to worry about tariffs.”
“I’m not sure they were really thinking about aircraft when they put the tariffs in place,” he offered, predicting “you’ll see non-US airplanes operated outside of the US stay outside of the US. Get their maintenance outside of the US, do their pre-buys outside of the US. And you can have a bifurcated market. What’s outside will stay outside. And what’s inside will primarily stay inside.”
The current added cost is 10% on non-US manufactured aircraft coming into the US, with the exception of Canadian, which is 25%, if it doesn’t qualify for the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement). “There’s a million caveats there,” Kleitman acknowledged, “but we’ll see what happens on July 9th. They don’t have the trade deals that they want in place. You could see them go back to 20%, 31% in Switzerland. It was much higher in some other jurisdictions.”
(Note: EBACE concluded before Donald Trump threatened the European Union with 50% tariffs.)
“I’m pretty confident we’re going to see some change,” he said. “Just don’t know what it is. And then it’ll change again.”
“It creates a lot of uncertainty at the moment,” echoed Ian Petts, Finance and Asset Management Specialist in the Ship and Yacht Company. “It’s not just tariffs. The tariffs are creating uncertainty on inflation. And inflation is one of the tough metrics that both Europe and America are really struggling to bring the inflation numbers down. With the tariff uncertainty at the moment, you just can’t map out what your business will look like, your operational costs and the purchase of an aircraft.”
Petts noted that in Europe, “if you divide by the number of aircraft, there are about 209 jobs per aircraft. It’s a massive job creation. So there’s a big incentive from both administrations, European and America, to get the aircraft fit right.”
“Tariffs are bad for everyone,” added EBAA Membership Director Paul Walsh, “except for lobbyists and lawyers.”
Petts added that, “here in Europe, we have 27 different countries, 27 different VAT rates across that, and then there’s the duties as well.”
“Go out there and get the advice before you move your aircraft, before you buy your aircraft… get the advisors engaged as soon as possible, because it’s an evolving situation.”
Training Presence
The training sector was, comme d’habitude, represented by the Big Two of business aviation, CAE and FlightSafety International.
One surprise exhibitor, though, was data-management startup Hinfact in the French pavilion, which heretofore has focused on the airline training support market. Toulouse-based Hinfact announced a contract with Jetfly, a fractional ownership company in Luxembourg which specializes in Pilatus PC-12, PC-24 and Cirrus Jet aircraft. In the Hinfact booth, I bumped into Frédéric LeBoeuf, longtime Falcon operational director with whom I worked on projects at Dassault; LeBoeuf is consulting with Hinfact, leveraging his 40-plus years of experience.
Montréal-headquartered CAE was featuring its new Vienna, Austria training facility, its first bizav center in Central Europe. Business Aviation and Helicopter Training Division President Alexandre Prevost said, “there is strong demand for building facilities close to customers to make training more accessible and efficient.” The Vienna site is operational with a Gulfstream G550 full-flight simulator, to be joined later this year by FFSs for the Bombardier Global 7500 – the 1st in the EU, a Global Vision, an Embraer Phenom 100/300, and (in 2026) a Pilatus PC-24.
Prevost said longtime CAE CEO Marc Parent – who nearly doubled revenue across 15 years to $4.3 billion – will retire at the company’s annual general meeting in August. No successor has been announced. However, ‘activist investor’ Browning West has acquired a 4.3% stake in CAE and was looking to influence the selection, complimenting the company’s “enviable market position” in a letter to the board but stressing that it has “underperformed.” Another large shareholder, Jarislowsky Fraser, has also been “vocal” about wanting changes.
FSI two weeks ago announced expansion of its facilities at Farnborough Airport, expected to open in Q2 2027. FSI has operated at Farnborough since 2004, featuring 11 simulators for 14 aircraft types, including fixed- and rotary-wing. The new facilities will boost training capacity by more than 40%, and create a 4,680-square-metre space for six full-flight simulators, 10 lower-level training devices, and 19 classrooms.
A Smaller EBACE
The two most noticeable differences at EBACE this year were the spaciousness of the exhibit hall, less of a congested maze than in past years, owing somewhat to fewer exhibitors, and the absence of a static display of aircraft at the adjacent Geneva Airport.
Two years ago, environmental protestors chained themselves to aircraft gangways, occupied some jets and defaced aircraft with stickers. Bombardier and Gulfstream pulled out of the 2024 event, which was protested with a mock cardboard aircraft and homemade signs.
This year, Dassault was noticeably missing.
EBAA Chief Operating Officer Robert Baltus was confident “the popular static displays will return, but with a twist; they will be enhanced to truly capture the lifestyle enjoyed by private jet operators.”
But return to where? There have been rumblings for many years about moving the event out of Geneva, citing high costs of the city’s hotels. An attendee survey of potential options had Barcelona in the lead, choice of about 22%, followed by Paris (17%), Geneva (14%), Frankfurt, London, Milan, Vienna and Dublin.
Attendance at this year’s EBACE was about 4,000, compared with 6-7,000 in past years.