Asian Sky Quarterly 2023 Q1

EDITOR’S NOTE
Being a journalist is very much
like being in a real-world game
that you are constantly playing.
It goes something like this:
Company X wants to tell you
about its new product, service or
results. Whilst company X’s news
might be A) Mildly interesting, B)
Quite boring, or C) Totally untrue,
as a journalist you still have to play the game so that company X will
hopefully tell you more interesting stories further down the line.
The game is not as one-sided as it sounds. Company X is also playing,
as it needs journalists to be able to spread its news. It's strategy will
be to try and tell you just about enough to get you interested in its
story. However, this means that company X isn’t going to tell you what
you want to know, it will give you a sugar-coated version of events,
from which you will have to try and piece together the real story.
And so, the game begins. For the journalist it’s a frustrating case of
"I know that you know more than you are telling me, and I’m going
to try and get you to tell me more," whilst for company X it is more
along the lines of "I’ve been told that I can only say what I’ve told you
already, so I don’t want to risk getting told off by telling you more."
As a journalist, you quickly learn to read between the lies (sic), and, if
you’re meeting face-to-face, you quickly learn to look for tells – a wry
smile, a scratch of the nose, or in one case, from one PR person that
is sadly no longer working in the industry, a same handed scratch
under the armpit, much akin to a chimpanzee.
See, company X will always focus on the good news. It make sense,
after all they say that all news is good news. But that isn’t always
true. The FAA releasing an accident report saying that the cause
of an accident was that your pilot was drunk, or a disgruntled
passenger announcing that they are suing you as they booked a
flight on a Global 7500 but ended up on a 58-year-old IAI WestWind
instead, is never good news.
So the devil, as they say, is in the details, and never is that more true
than annual results season. We’ve seen the results from all of the
OEMs, operators and some of the brokers. Some have come out with
spectacular statements that focus solely on one positive, which all
the time belie the real story that’s buried deep inside their reports.
The good thing is that most reports are readily available on the
company’s investor relations websites, so they are easy to find and
dissect yourself. So next time you have some spare time, read the
accompanying press release first, then dig into the details of the
report. I’ll leave it to you to decide which ones are A), B) or C).
If you’ve picked up the EBACE special edition printed copy of Global
Sky Quarterly during EBACE and this is the first time that you have
read the publication, then thanks for joining us. I hope that you will
enjoy reading our publication and that you will consider signing up to
our distribution list to receive the electronic copy for free every time
it is published.
If you’re a long-time reader (Thanks!) then you will be familiar with
many of the sections in this Quarterly. There are a few changes since
the previous issue, the biggest of which being that our justifiably
famous Mood and Intentions survey now not only focusses on Asia-
Pacific, but its coverage has been expanded to cover all parts of the
globe to give a truly worldwide picture of where the business aviation
industry will be heading in the next six months. We also have a deep
dive into the Europe market, with our very own Qianyun Zhou and
Jeffrey Tang presenting data and analysis on the second biggest
business aviation market in the world.
SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS AND SPONSORS
2 | GLOBAL SKY QUARTERLY — FIRST QUARTER 2023