When the preview issue of European Business Air News first went to the printers in July 1989 [under its original title of European Business Aviation Magazine], its readers were known to be operating 3,000 aircraft out of seventeen European countries. Over the last decade, that figure has risen to 9,000 aircraft, notwithstanding the magazine’s additional coverage of the Middle East.

On the front page of this preview issue, erstwhile BAUA (Business Aviation Users Association) chairman John Feltham wrote: “The members of this Association are alone responsible for generating an estimated £20 billion a year, a substantial proportion of which must come from inter-European trade. Such exchange of goods and services will rapidly escalate from now onwards.

“Business aviation is inevitably an essential element in such an operation – the company car of the international 21st century.

“I hope that EBAM will provide a valuable link between all companies and all countries who fly together

and trade together within the European community.”

Meanwhile, a personal message from then International Business Aviation Council chairman Mr W H Alexander, OBE, read: “Despite the vast advance in worldwide telecommunications, there is still nothing to replace face-to-face contact between men with the right experience, in the right place and at the right time.

“Such contact has to be not only continent-wide but intercontinental, and business aviation plays an increasingly important part in making it possible.

“I hope that European Business Aviation Magazine will help us both in pooling our experiences, and in providing a common channel of protest against opposition and restrictions with which we are increasingly faced, from the other and powerful aviation interests.”