For our Perspectives series, we talk to experienced business aviation industry professionals who share with us their individual insights and offer a window into their world. This month's interviewee is Trevor Esling, who until recently was regional senior VP of sales for Gulfstream Aerospace. He has launched full service business aviation company Vulcan Aviation with Roger Whyte, former senior VP of worldwide sales and marketing at Cessna Aircraft Company, and Barry Johnson, CEO of Executive Jet Charter. From its headquarters at Farnborough airport, Vulcan will support a select international client group at every stage of the aircraft ownership journey, from acquisitions and sales to management, operations and maintenance.

“Vulcan really started coming together after I left Gulfstream. It started to take shape towards the end of last year, and we’ve been working on it since that time, pulling various things together such as the website. It’s a business all built around relationships. I’ve known Barry and Roger for decades, and here was an opportunity for us to do something outside the normal scope of things. Roger and I worked for the same OEM and then I went on to Gulfstream after he retired and left Cessna. I’ve known Barry since the late 80s when I was at British Aerospace and he was working for BP. It was an opportunity to bring all those relationships together and do something by ourselves, bringing to market a project that would benefit from our various expertise. We wanted to build on Barry’s experience on the operations side, and ours on the sales, and that’s what Vulcan is: a international sales capability, building on a very strong pre-existing operations capability. We felt there was a need to offer a little more knowledge than a customer would normally receive in the course of buying an aircraft. Buying, operating and maintaining an aircraft is a complicated business, and we have a good feel for all of those things. We want to be a full-service organisation, and at some point we will add on maintenance capabilities. We have aimed to make it reasonably boutique-like while cultivating a good reputation. We hope that’s what Vulcan will grow to be and be recognised in the market for that capability.

There might be one or two people who disagree with me, but I see Farnborough as the centre of business aviation in the UK. Barry has an office there through EJC and I live in the local area and have worked for many years at Farnborough.

Owners come to us with a budget, and might for example be seeking a long range aircraft. They want to know the pros and cons of buying a G550, a Global XRS let’s say, or a Falcon 7X. We would let them know the state of the market, and how to operate the aircraft, which register to place it on and so on. Operating costs economics based on experience too; the ‘whole nine yards’. Hopefully we can grow the number of aircraft under management with Barry as well. Maintenance will be a nice add-on too.

We don’t have a preference for particular OEMs, we like to offer advice across the whole range. Our experience is primarily on Gulfstream, Cessna and Hawker, and the King Airs, but Barry also has experience in operating and maintaining Bombardier types. From a sales perspective, I’m very familiar with the Bombardier aircraft, because I was selling against them: be it Learjets, Challengers or Globals. We are not particularly promoting one model over another, it’s a case of putting the facts in front of the customer and establishing the parameters.

We’ve launched on the sales side for the fixed wing, and we’d really like to build that. It’s progressive growth that we are after. I think the international market, that is to say the market outside the US, will take a little bit of time to come back, and that is likely to go on into 2022. Restrictions should slowly ease up, making travel easier. I think we will continue to add parts to the business we are working on, adding a couple of elements behind the scenes to augment the business with. There will be more announcements to come from us in the first quarter of 2022, I think, and then we’ll be all set.

The market in the US is very hot at the moment, driven by everything that President Trump did during his administration, and then further augmented by central banks as a result of the pandemic. We are now seeing – progressively -more freedom of movement, and people have significantly warmed to the idea of travelling in a business jet. So, the market in the USA in particular is doing very well at the moment with international sales somewhat slower due to a more difficult environment for travel, but of course these dynamics between the activity levels in the US and international markets have always ebbed and flowed depending on economic conditions that exist at the time. The criteria are the same either way. As COVID progressively falls away and becomes less of an inhibitor to international travel, and when coupled with a significant government stimuli and low interest rates, I expect Europe, the Middle East and other international markets will come back strongly next year.”