April 3, 2024
Fractional ownership buyers may have some new options to consider if Airbus Corporate Jets and Dassault Falcon enter the market.
Dassault Falcon’s first private jet, the Mystere, was delivered to a fleet customer, Pan American World Airways, 60 years ago this month.
It has been absent from fractional fleets since NetJets stopped taking new customers in its Falcon 200EX program, although it still operates 14 of the type in its European fleet.
Airbus Corporate Jets has never had a fleet airplane until now.
Speaking during separate press conferences at the European Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition today in Geneva, Switzerland, top executives say they are optimistic their airplanes will be part of fractional programs in the not-too-distant future.
Asked about the possibility, Dassault Aviation CEO Eric Trappier said, “We have been discussing with these companies…We want to be back.”
He declined to specify which of Dassault’s aircraft he believed would be of most interest to fractional providers.
ACJ President Benoit Defforge said his company’s ACJ TwoTwenty is complimentary to other large cabin aircraft fractional providers are offering from Gulfstream via Flexjet and Bombardier via NetJets.
He compared it to luxury cars.
“Some people want a Ferrari. Some people want a Rolls Royce, and some people want both,” Defforge told Private Jet Card Comparisons.
He called the TwoTwenty “an amazing aircraft for fractional” and said, “It’s just a matter of time.”
In the early 2000s, NetJets offered the Boeing Business Jet in its fractional fleet.
Last week, NetJets added Embraer’s Praetor 500 to its lineup in a deal valued at more than $5 billion.
