Why Business Aviation Firms Have to Reposition Continuously.

“Nothing is fixed. The state of ‘finished’ is disappearing. Everything is always being updated, improved, or remade.” Kevin Kelly, ‘The Inevitable’

Kevin Kelly wrote a wonderful book in 2017, called ‘The Inevitable’. In The Inevitable, he framed the next era of technology around a set of verbs: products turn into services, services turn into flows, users stay in permanent learning mode. “Endless newbie is the new default for everyone,” he wrote.

This applies directly to business aviation. The industry cannot define itself about who they once were and rely on reputation to do the rest of the work. The market keeps reshaping itself around ownership models, sanctions regimes, tax treatment, access economics and client expectations.

Nothing stays still long enough for a static strategy to pay off. In business aviation, any firm pinning its identity to the conditions of 2019 or 2022, or even 2024, is selling against a market that no longer exists.

Business aviation knows this from recent experience. The post COVID demand surge reset the customer base. Sanctions rewrote the legal map for Russian linked ownership. Engine availability turned heavy maintenance into a commercial event. Tariffs were imposed, lifted, and imposed again. Each shift devalued some services and made others suddenly central.

The temptation is to read all the tariff, sanctions, and war issues as turbulence to be ridden out, wait for normality to return, resume the old plan.

However, the previous equilibrium is not coming back. Ever.

Focus on Core Competencies and Capabilities

‘Repositioning’ continuously sounds, like a recipe for having no identity at all. However, as Kelly spells out, and which the market keeps demonstrating, is that the durable asset in a ‘becoming’ world is that of the ‘core competency’. A ‘core competency’ is the capability that underpins multiple offerings as the market changes.

What lessons can we draw from Kevin Kelly’s ideas and approach to core competencies?

• The market will constantly evolve, so the proposition to the market needs to be constantly updated.
• Accept that what the core competence and capability will be applied to lots of different contexts that will change, often, and sometimes quickly.
• Treat the core competence and capability as strategic assets to invest in and protect.

Coming soon! Our State of Business Aviation 2026 eBook; a practical resource for the months ahead.