Boutsen Aviation is about to deliver its fiftieth aircraft, a CitationJet, to a French customer. Sales numbers have now hit 53, Boutsen said: “The market is quite difficult at the moment due to the depreciation in prices. We’ve found it a lot more time-consuming and are now spending a lot more money on publicity to promote our clients’ aircraft. Nevertheless, we’ve been doing well and in the last couple of months we’ve sold a Citation Bravo and a Challenger.”

Boutsen is remaining optimistic in these uncertain times: “There are two ways of approaching the current situation. One is that you concentrate on your work and try and do your job as well as you can.

“The other is to try and over- analyse everything, which will work against you. At the end of the day there are always people wanting to buy and sell aircraft and it’s our job to put them together.”

The company delivers aircraft across the globe. “We’ve recently had a Challenger go to Israel, two Cessna 421s to France and a Citation Bravo to Greece, so we’re trying to remain very international.

“We haven’t really experienced a slump over the last year in terms of the numbers of aircraft sold, in

fact it’s been the opposite. There has however been a slump in prices, so sales have been down to whether people selling their aircraft are willing to drop their prices,” he said.

Boutsen, the Piaggio dealer for Monaco, France and Belgium, added: “We have also just delivered

a pre-owned P180 over to the US, which came from France. The market in the US for the P180 is still

a lot more buoyant than that in Europe.

“It’s still not yet known well enough over here, which is a point we’ve been trying very hard to

rectify. There has been a lot of interest though and a number of demo flights. As more people fly in

it, it’s generating greater enthusiasm which we hope will produce more sales.

“In general it takes around three months to find a new owner for a pre-owned P180 and a further three months to seal the deal. Compared with the other pre-owned aircraft that we sell the P180 seems to

sell faster. In fact along with the TBM 700, it’s the only aircraft I know which has managed to keep its price.”

The former Formula 1 racing driver has seen his market change over the last couple of years: “A number of people were very enthusiastic about owning an aircraft prior to 2000, because they were very conscious of their image when they arrived somewhere. These guys have now disappeared, but the real aircraft owner who uses it for business is still flying, buying and selling aircraft.”