Every year, the team at Martyn Fiddler like to reflect on happened that year, see if there is anything we can learn – or even learn to forget!
After three years of post-pandemic distortion, 2025 was the year business aviation stepped back onto stable ground. One of our themes in 2025 and for 2026, is how can we plan in such a topsy-turvy world.
Should we use chicken entrails or just change the flight plan to navigate the future?
Events, policy decisions, and political choices are occurring so quickly that accurately predicting future political, cultural, and business conditions resembles consulting tarot cards or reading chicken entrails for guidance.
Chicken’s entrails were used by ancient oracles and are, as you can imagine, somewhat unreliable methods for making important decisions. More reliable methods for decision making such an evidence-based approach is what we think we need.
However, as Rishad Tobaccowala writes, that “the future does not fit in the containers of the past”.
The year 2025 has been a defining period for artificial intelligence investment, marking the transition from experimental ‘hype’ to massive-scale industrialisation.
As of late November 2025, global AI investment has surged, driven primarily by infrastructure buildouts (data centres and chips) and historic ‘mega-rounds’ of funding for foundational model companies such as OpenAI.
According to major analyst firms like Gartner, total worldwide spending on AI (including software, hardware, and services) is projected to reach approximately $1.48 trillion by the end of 2025.
If you took $1.48 trillion in $1 bills and stacked them on top of each other, the pile would reach approximately 100,442 miles (161,645 kilometres) into space.
To put that staggering height into perspective:
- 4 times around the Earth: It is tall enough to wrap around the Earth’s equator more than 4 times.
- 40% to the Moon: It would reach about 42% of the way to the Moon (which is roughly 239,000 miles away).
- Beyond the satellites: It would soar far past the International Space Station (250 miles up)
The Martyn Fiddler take on how to plan in an AI world
Martyn Fiddler proposes having a ‘flexible flight plan’. What does this mean?
- In business aviation, these numbers matter not because jets will become ‘AI-powered spaceships’, but because investment on this scale inevitably will reshape supply chains, operational planning, and customer behaviour. The real question for operators, OEMs, and brokers isn’t what AI can do today, but which parts of tomorrow’s industry it will rewire.
- 2025 showed that we can no longer navigate by historical instruments alone. New tools, new models and new assumptions are required. The flight plan has changed.
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