A Bigger Tent for All Business Fliers
By J. Mac McClellan
August 2008
 What comes to mind when you think of the National Business Aviation Association? If you say the NBAA represents traditional corporate flight departments with full-time professional pilots flying turbine-powered aircraft, you would be correct. At least that describes the core of the NBAA. But Ed Bolen, president and CEO of the hugely successful association, says that picture has to change.
The way Bolen sees it, a conventional business flight department just can't effectively lobby in Washington against the airlines and other groups that want to burden business flying with new restrictions and costs. That's why he wants anybody and everybody who flies any type of aircraft to band together under the NBAA banner to promote and protect the business of flying for business.
The NBAA was born in 1946 and officially founded in 1947 as the Corporation Aircraft Owners Association. The formation of the association grew out of a crisis not unrecognizable from today's conditions -- a dire shortage of airport and airway capacity to handle both airliners and "independent" airplanes, as business airplanes were labeled by the news media at the time. The Wall Street Journal and other major newspapers cited one bad-weather winter day when only 69 of 175 scheduled arrivals at La Guardia actually landed and just 52 of 175 scheduled departures actually took off, to note the scope of the problem. And every prediction was that conditions would only grow worse with rapid expansion of both airline and independent fleets.
The founding companies of the association were major corporations who had the resources to operate their own airplanes. Many of the names of the companies attending the original meetings are familiar still -- General Electric, BF Goodrich, Corning Glass, Bristol-Meyers, and so on. These companies feared they would be squeezed out of the airway and air traffic system that was in the process of transitioning from one built and owned by the airlines to a national system under the control of the CAA, the predecessor of the FAA. And airport capacity was stretched to the limit at major cities and the airlines were not eager to share runway space.
The new association's efforts paid off and business aircraft gained equal access to the new rapidly expanding air traffic control system and network of airports. Threats to airspace access reoccurred over the years with restrictions on unscheduled operations at major airports such as Washington National, O'Hare and La Guardia, but the NBAA was instrumental in keeping those airports open to business aircraft crews who made reservations for slots. When all of general aviation IFR flying was restricted following the firing of the air traffic controllers, NBAA helped keep the system open to the high flying turbine airplanes its members operate while much greater restrictions fell on the piston airplanes at the lower altitudes. And NBAA has been effective in minimizing restrictions on business airplanes following the September 11 attacks.
From the beginning the association was very specific about what was a business airplane and what wasn't. Companies that operated only single-engine airplanes were not allowed in. And private pilots didn't qualify, either. Member companies needed to have professional pilots with commercial licenses. The association was determined to set corporate flying apart from the rest of general aviation.
Though some of the early leaders of NBAA may have just been plain snooty about light airplanes, the real reason for the focus on state of the art equipment and pilot qualification was safety. The accident record for both business and airline flying in the late 1940s and 1950s was abysmal compared to the past 20 or 30 years, and if corporate aviation were ever to fulfill its goal of becoming an efficient tool of business it needed to have the best possible safety record. It would be impossible to rank airport and airspace access ahead of safety as the major objectives of the association because both are paramount.
Again, the NBAA has succeeded in helping to make corporate aviation very safe and essentially on par with the airlines. Operators who abide by NBAA guidelines and use only full-time professional pilots who train regularly at recognized schools always have a better safety record than others flying the same type of airplanes. The NBAA, and the business jet industry, typically parses the accident statistics to show the "corporate" safety record versus "private or business" flying, or charter, and the corporate is always better. And there is no comparison of the corporate safety record to the rest of general aviation because the gulf in safety is so great.
NBAA and industry have also worked together to promote business flying with hugely successful meetings and conventions around the world where operators gather to examine the latest the manufacturers have to offer. Income from its tradeshows has made the NBAA a very well-funded association, but it's not a one-way street because the industry has benefited from the concentrated gathering of prospects to sell its wares, and all are helped by the lobbying success the association has had to help protect business flying interests.
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