Over the next ten years Europe's fleet of business aircraft will grow by around four per cent per year, from around 2,000 today to about 3,000 by 2015, according to a new report issued by Eurocontrol.

It says: "This means around 1,100 extra flights each day in Europe by 2015, which will add between 0.4 per cent per year to predicted growth in flights, or up to 0.7 per cent in a scenario with strong growth in very light jet traffic."

The report, entitled 'Getting to the Point: Business Aviation in Europe' said that, in 2005, 6.9 per cent of the 9.2 million flights in Europe were business aviation. Flights by business jets are growing particularly strongly, up 8.9 per cent on 2004 while the growth in flights by turboprops grew by 2.4 per cent and piston aircraft flew two per cent fewer flights over the same period.

"Growth on these levels presents a number of challenges for air traffic management," said Bo Redeborn, Director of ATM Strategies at Eurocontrol. "Business aviation generates peaks of demand at airports, and while it uses different flight levels from the major carriers, getting the different types of traffic to their preferred levels creates additional traffic complexity for controllers, particularly given the concentration of business aviation in an already busy airspace."

The report recognises that business aviation is a real point-to-point form of air travel, more than filling gaps in the scheduled carriers' networks. The network of airport pairs linked by business aviation has 100,000 links, three times as many links as the scheduled flight network. This generates substantial time savings but also spreads the already small volumes of traffic amongst a large number of small airports; only 30 per cent of business aviation departures are from airports with more than 100 instrument flight rules departures each day. Providing infrastructure at these airports is the challenge. If this challenge can be met, then business aviation could provide just the service that is needed to relieve congestion at the largest airports, the report concludes.