India is home to 53 billionaires and 1,00,000 millionaires. The high spending power has engineered a shift away from just owning a business aircraft to having a custom built one—with personalised colour schemes and embellishments.

Away from the airbus and boeing bout to secure the largest chunk of the market for commercial jets, the business aviation customer is ploughing through his own bill of fare. And it is a lavish spread. Very Light Jets (VLJs) were hailed a couple of months ago as the SUVs of the skies. Small, relatively less expensive jets (like the Cessna Mustang) are being labeled as the Model Ts that fly. These and other new business jets are displaying an eager and impatient yearning for transforming the paradigm of business aviation. The new technology business jets, small in size, and quick to turn round, represent comparatively inexpensive options for private aviation. The comparison to sports cars is not just on account of sleek looks and speed, there is also the subliminal linkage which renders business jets objects of desire, symbols of status and something you must have if the Jones’s possess one. That these represent a convenient and controllable means of travel between places is an important but not the most significant reason for procuring a business jet. The shrinking gap between affordability of a business jet and the purchasing power of a large number of business houses and businessmen is the scenesetter for a boom in business aviation.

While airlines are going bankrupt worldwide (six during the last two months) and mergers are taking place between others (Delta and Northwest, for one), the market for corporate aircraft is having a comparatively prosperous spell. Needless to say, the central cause is the attractive costs at which new business jets are available. A VLJ is around $1.5 million (Rs 6.4 crore) to $3 million (Rs 13 crore). These prices are lower than those of most business jets flying around at the beginning of 2007; so is their cost of running—less by as much as 30 per cent according to one estimate. No surprise then that the world wide sale of business jets for 2007 stood at more than 1,000 and the sales over the next 10 years are expected to average 1,400 per year.

At the recently concluded European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition, Bombardier announced its market forecast. Expressing optimism about increasing delivery numbers through the next decade, the Canadian company has predicted growth in non-US markets would drive the business jet deliveries to 1,320 annually between 2008 and 2017, compared with the industry average of 620 in the period from 1998 to 2007.

One important reason for the business jet prices becoming attractive is the fact that the aviation world generally uses the US dollar as the functional currency; the steady fall of the dollar has meant that business houses raking in earnings in currencies other than US dollars find the price tags on these business jets eye catching. There is a problem about these jets not being fitted with Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS), and therefore about their full exploitation (an aircraft without TCAS on board may not fly above 29,000 ft like one with TCAS can). However, even flights at 29,000 ft and below are worthy of corporate interest.