Cessna Aircraft Company is expanding production to cut a delivery backlog that means new orders cannot be delivered until 2008. Roger Whyte, senior vice-president of sales and marketing, told EBAN: "We have sold out of everything this year." He added: "We have got a longer backlog than we would ideally like."

With global demand rising, Cessna was "having to focus on increasing production to bring down delivery times." The company is looking at delivery dates of 2009 for the Citation Mustang. About 80 per cent of the 240-plus orders for the Mustang are from owner-operators.

Whyte predicts that the business aviation market in Europe will continue to grow as economies expand and more businesses plug into the efficiencies of business jets.

He added: "We are finding a lot of interest in our CJ line of Citations and the Sovereign and the XLS are gaining tremendous popularity with our European customers. We think the Citation Mustang is going to do very well in Europe."

Whyte said that executives of western European companies were travelling a great deal more to the east with Russia, Hungary and the Czech Republic among the popular destinations.

Private jet demand in the Middle East was rising with much more travel between countries in the region including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the Lebanon.