EBAN's qualified, aircraft-operating readers are nothing if not consistent, electing Mallorcair and TAG Farnborough as the top rated specialist business aviation handlers in Europe and the Middle East again.

But it was a closer-run affair this year, with Multiflight putting up a brave bid for the top and the resort handlers Aviation Beauport and Eccelsa scoring highly to complete the leading five.

We report on some of the winners here, and in the following pages we detail the facilities on offer around the continent. We have included listings for all those which responded to our many requests for information, and we also offer basic information about every handler on our web site at www.handbook.aero.

Between September 2008 and January this year our voters were able to rank any number of FBOs - some taking the time to provide scores for over thirty! We'd like to express our thanks to all those who took part for creating, once again, such a revealing snapshot of the industry.

We asked for a score out of nine for each of three categories; facilities, services and staff. To do well, an FBO must have good infrastructure, meet every customer need, and have highly trained and motivated people on the ground. The scores in our table are an average of the three categories.

There are excellent specialist handlers which do not feature in the list simply because they did not receive enough votes to meet our statistical minima, so for 2010 we are going to start the voting process earlier. Look out for our emails or for the voting form on the back of your mailing address sheet from June 2009 and you can help shape the rankings for the next EBAN survey!

How the FBO Feedback system works

In order to ensure that the voting system is fair and that every EBAN reader has the opportunity to vote for their favourite FBOs, each aircraft-operating reader was provided with a personalised web page as well as forms on our magazine mailing sheets, on which to cast votes.

To be eligible for inclusion on the rankings table, each FBO had to accrue at least point seven of one per cent of the total votes cast, thereby minimising statistical aberrations.

Although the high ranking handling agents deserve recognition for their excellent results, there were many FBOs which simply did not receive a high enough proportion of the votes to become eligible for inclusion.