Good story in this week's Aviation Week about the drastic decline in the business jet industry and, particularly, its manufacturing bastion in Wichita, Kan. Jet makers Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Learjet, all based in Wichita, have had seen huge drops in new orders and deliveries.
The story, timed to coincide with the opening of the National Business Aviation Association trade show and convention which begins tomorrow in Orlando, recounts the gory details of the last 12 months:
Even when the global credit crisis hit three months later, there were still hopes the industry would be shielded by record backlogs and global orders that had made it less reliant on the U.S. economy. As the National Business Aviation Assn. (NBAA) convention opened in Orlando, Fla., in October 2008, aircraft manufacturers were telling their suppliers to expect no cuts in production rates. A Honeywell forecaster opined that the credit crisis’s impact on the industry would be “a short-term blip.”
Then it all came crashing down, with a suddenness and severity that no executives had foreseen, even in their worst-case models. Unable to secure financing, huge numbers of buyers deferred delivery or abandoned their deposits and walked away. Meanwhile, new orders slowed to a trickle as a global recession intensified and politicians in Washington, including President Barack Obama, attacked the use of private jets as a symbol of corporate excess (see p. 58).
In less than a year, Wichita’s three business jet producers—Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier’s Learjet—have shed about 12,000 jobs, or nearly 30% of the local aerospace workforce, and watched billions of dollars of backlog vanish. Only Spirit AeroSystems—an aerostructures manufacturer that relies on production of large passenger jets built by Boeing—has been able to avoid layoffs.
