Economic impacts of Business Aviation in Europe

Abstract

Despite of being an important segment of non-scheduled air transport, the Business Aviation sector has hardly been dealt with in the academic literature. We give insight into the European Business Aviation sector with a special focus on its economic impacts. Based on an extensive data collection, we conduct an input-output analysis and find that about 374,000 European jobs depend directly or indirectly from Business Aviation activities, which further represent 0.2% of the European (EU28) GDP. In addition, a data analysis approach comparing actual European Business Aviation flights against the fastest commercial travel alternatives indicates that users of Business Aviation experience average travel time savings of 127 minutes and a 150% average increase in productive work time per trip, as well as annual savings of about €15 million in overnight hotel. These effects partly stem from improved connectivity, as Business Aviation serves about 25k city or area pairs which are not connected by nonstop scheduled services, including many region-pairs of different economic strengths.