A record-breaking 1,285 BJT subscribers responded to our 2016 Readers’ Choice survey—a 26 percent increase from last year. As promised, we have made a contribution on behalf of those subscribers to Corporate Angel Network, which arranges free flights on business aircraft to treatment centers for cancer patients and their families.

As in past years, we devoted the bulk of our survey to soliciting your assessments of aircraft models and manufacturers. But our 2016 poll also included some new questions. For the first time, for example, we asked you to tell us how you respond to criticism of business aviation. We also asked you to rate specific fractional-share and charter providers, and we received enough response to allow us to publish results for some of the larger companies.

As for the questions that we repeated from previous surveys, the results tend to be in line with what we’ve seen in past years. Once again, for instance, readers ranked “save time” as their number-one reason for flying privately, followed by “ability to use airports that the airlines don’t serve,” which in fact represents one of the ways that business aviation saves time.

As in recent years, readers reported that their flying frequency remained largely unchanged, with many of you saying you flew about as much as in the previous 12 months and with the percentage who flew more about equal to the percentage who flew less. Also as in recent surveys, though, respondents predicted more time in the air in the year ahead: only 9 percent expect to fly less while 37 percent anticipate flying more.

NOTE: The last page of this online version of the survey includes demographic data that did not appear in print.

BJT 2016 Readers' Survey (1.3MB)