Aviation brokers and underwriters have a new villain to blame for the continued increases in insurance premiums since 2019: inflation. Aircraft owners, pilots, operators, and supporting aviation businesses have reportedly seen insurance premiums increase up to 30 percent year-over-year since 2019.

In addition, certain pilot and operator segments are finding it increasingly difficult to even obtain insurance. Brokers are resorting to complex quota share and vertical placement agreements previously used mainly in the airline segment to cover risks that no single carrier wants to cover on its own.

On Feb. 15, 2005, Tricia Coffman did not want her husband to step aboard a private jet the next day. She asked him to fly commercial, worried about his safety. He promised her that he would be fine. The next day, her husband, 34-year-old David Joseph Coffman Sr., five other passengers, and two crewmembers perished when their Cessna Citation 560, N500AT, crashed as it approached Colorado's Pueblo Memorial Airport (KPUB) for a fuel stop.

Her story presented to attendees at the 2020 Air Charter Safety Foundation’s Air Charter Safety Symposium was about her personal experience—how she learned of his death; how she explained to her four children, all of whom were too young to fully comprehend; and how her husband’s company and the NTSB handled the aftermath.

The best-selling midsize Citation Excel is still available for purchase in factory-new form, having morphed from the original 560XL in various iterations and now called the Ascend. But not surprisingly, a team of former Cessna Citation executives have taken on a small corner of the used market for the Excel and created a refurbished version—the Citation Excel Eagle—filling a market niche for buyers who like the airplane but don’t want to spend $17 million on the newest version.

While the Excel Eagle is new in terms of avionics, interior, paint, and some other features, it does start with a preowned airframe and the existing engines, but the mod package extends the life of the Excel well into the coming decades.

While supply issues remain a considerable thorn in the side of the business aviation industry, and wars and border tensions threaten to destabilize business in certain regions, the outlook for the sector is generally positive for the remainder of 2023 and into the next year. That is the analysis of business aviation market intelligence specialist JetNet iQ in its latest quarterly report.

There are longer-term issues that need to be addressed to maintain positivity, including sustainability, improving the industry’s image, and restoring the talent pipelines of young, enthusiastic people entering the industry—and retaining them for the long term, it said.