Community Enthusiasm On Exhibit Floor Confirmed By Business Aircraft Sales

By ANN Correspondent Dave Higdon

Smoke without mirrors. That seems to be the prevailing impression from the 58th Annual convention of the National Business Aviation Association Convention in Orlando. Maybe the better cliche should be, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." 'Cause there sure seems to be plenty of fire in this year's hurricane-displaced convention as it's playing out at the Orange County Convention Center.

The smoke at this event isn't just a magician's tool. Action on the exhibit-hall floor reflects a hotter-than-usual sales market - which matches the other record-setting traits of this NBAA meeting. Just look at some of the numbers:

Triple digit order announcements - more than 100 alone on Day Two of NBAA. Cessna announced the sale of 28 Citations, adding to an existing $6 billion -- yeah, with a "b" -- backlog; Eclipse added 80 to a sales book that already stood at 2,277; Piaggio, with its freshly certificated, sexier-than-your-shirt Avanti II (below), logged in another 36 orders. Fractionals, charter, aircraft-management firms and individuals were all represented among the buying-like-crazy crowd.

Forecasters predict strong jet sales during the next 10 years -- one even saying orders could exceed 15,000 if you include VLJs. And that forecast didn't include visionary Linden Blue's newly announced Spectrum 33. New variants of existing aircraft should help feed this growth - aircraft like the Citation Encore+ from Cessna, the Bombardier Challenger 605 and Learjet 60XR (below) announced earlier this week, and the long-anticipated Sino-Swearingen SJ30-2, which earned its wings just prior to the convention's opening.

And, as the man on TV likes to say, there's more. Gulfstream Aerospace announced the months-ahead-of-schedule approval for the G150 and Adam Aircraft was able to announce the first customer delivery of its A500 - as well as its plans to move into certification on the A700 VLJ. And Brazil's Embraer firmed its plans to expand into the very light- and light-jet markets - as it had already announced - by giving its two new birds new names, the Phenom 100 (below) and Phenom 300. Embraer's expansive new exhibit drove home the company's growing commitment to business aviation as much as Cessna's new -- and visually stunning -- exhibit.

Surprised? Maybe we shouldn't be. Numbers for the convention floor previously reported included record numbers of vendors exhibiting, record numbers of booth spaces sold and major growth in the number of companies exhibiting at NBAA for the first time - above the century mark.

Even Day Two attendance numbers seem to hint at the possibility of a jump over the numbers from NBAA's last visit to the Orange County Convention Center. A whopping 26,788 were registered as of Thursday, November 10. That's only 1,586 short of the 28,374 total for all three days of NBAA spent in Orlando in October 2003.

And that convention was held where it was originally planned on its original dates - not uprooted and replanted nearly a 1,000 miles from its originally planned locale.

Sure, with 110 airplanes, the NBAA Static Display at Orlando Executive Airport isn't near the record numbers of year's past, when upward of 150 airplanes stood by for delegate examination. And there's still a whole day to go.

Thanks to the schedule change, the 2005 NBAA convention ends on Friday instead of the traditional Thursday. With many people planning to give themselves a weekend in Mickey-land, Friday just could push NBAA's unexpected Orlando year above any previous Orlando convention.

But even without attendance matching the 31,000-plus set in Las Vegas several visits back, NBAA 2005 reflects a business-aviation community as much on the grow as it is on the go -- and itching to go on to new heights.

FMI: www.nbaa.org