Boeing Business Jets and PrivatAir, the Swiss 'private airline', have kicked off their joint tour of Europe and the Middle East. After initial stops amid the glare of the Swiss, Dutch, Swedish and French media, PrivatAir's 28-seater BBJ winged its way to London Stansted where EBAN's Richard Evans caught up with staff and crew alike.\rFred Kelley, BBJ's director of pr and advertising, said: "On Friday, March 17, we officially opened the tour with a press event and demo flight in Geneva. From there we flew to Rotterdam and from Rotterdam to Stockholm. So far we've had excellent press attendance and lots of people interested in the flight."\rThe tour has thus far attracted a mixture of national, regional and aviation press. While staff at France's Le Figaro were covering the event on the Paris leg, journalists at London's Financial Times and The Times were preparing their questions for the tour's organisers. While the topic of business aviation is bread and butter material for most aviation press, of most interest so far, has been the reaction of the general press.\rKelley said: "I haven't read the coverage in Le Figaro yet. However, I sense in Europe, to a much larger extent than in the United States, there's a great deal of sensitivity to general/private aviation. It is perceived as a luxury for the rich and an excess for companies to operate private jets. Basically, something the shareholders would not agree with or like. \r"One of the reasons we're doing this tour is to try to get big companies, through the media, to see it in another light, to see it as part of the evolution of a new kind of global competitiveness. A company that wants to be competitive in this world has got to have something like this because it has got to be able to move, to be fully resource capable wherever it is.\r"In addition, I don't think PrivatAir or BBJ as a product are really very well known outside the industry. Boeing is well known but BBJ is not and neither is PrivatAir."\rEach day of the tour consists of a press conference at 9.15am, a press flight at 10am and at 1pm a client-based flight. Open viewings then ensue from 2 until 5pm, before the next city is targeted at 6. Kelley quipped: "And that's our life from March 13 to April 21, when we end up in Moscow as our last stop."\rOther destinations en route will include Madrid, Vienna, Munich, Cologne, Dubai, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Jeddah, Riyadh and Kiev.\rKelley says that until Boeing's BBJ is fully capable of 'global mobile', all its aircraft will have big servers for downloading and 10 or 12 laptop plug-ins so that you can function as though you were on the network.\r"However," he said, "what our chairman wants is to be in a position where he can be flying to Tokyo but at the same time conducting a live video conference with operations in Wichita and Cape Canaveral." \rBoeing has delivered 39 green BBJs so far and has picked seven completion centres around the world - five in the US, two in Europe - to handle the workload. The company's own BBJ has not yet been delivered. Kelley said: "We would have liked to have our demonstrator much earlier. One of the completion centres that we've picked has the lion's share of the aircraft, because they've got all the NetJets work, and they've got our demonstrator and several other aircraft as well. I think they just over-committed, based on the capacity that they had.\r"So we're a little bit late with the demonstrator but it's due out at the end of April 2000." \rWhile its own demonstrator is to be shared between Boeing Business Jets, its sales people and the executive flight operations department (which handles transportation for the chairman), Kelley said: "Theoretically we have priority but in actuality, it is being negotiated. The optimum target is that we will have an aircraft available to demonstrate to any potential customer, anywhere in the world, any time they want, over the next 18 months or so."\rWhile the BBJ/PrivatAir tour continues, and Boeing appears to have won the latest round of publicity oneupmanship against rival Airbus and its A319CJ , Kelley told EBAN: "I would never make the mistake of underestimating Airbus and their ability to respond or be entirely competitive. \r"Right now, it doesn't seem as though they're going about this in the same way as we are. They don't have a separate organisation, separate sales, marketing, contracts, engineering or customer support organisation dedicated specifically to this product. \r"We don't think that the performance characteristics that they're showing for their product is as good as what we're showing for ours, we think we're doing a better job. However, I hesitate to tell them what they're doing wrong because they might start doing it right!" \r Boeing's own BBJ will be on display at this year's Farnborough exhibition. Kelley added: "Since it will be our most expensive asset, we hope to have it scheduled to be doing something all the time."\rPrivatAir also has a 16- and 46-seater BBJ. While the 16-seater is allocated for 'real vvip stuff,' regarding PrivatAir's 46-seater BBJ, commercial director James Hay had this message: "With 180 minutes ETOPS, we can fly almost anywhere in the world so you'd better book fast because it's already pretty much sold out for 2001."\rOf the 28-seater BBJ and its relative economics, Hay said: "If you've 20 people, we can fly you and your friends to New York, you can stay for two days, come back and it will cost you basically a business class fare. \r"So, other than the productivity argument, there is now the pure cost argument. When you're putting 30 to 40 people onboard, there are huge cost savings to be had."