US manufacturer Gulfstream is targeting Australia with its new G650 business jet, and is prepared to put support where the customers are in Asia Pacific.
Speaking to Australian Flying at Avalon, Senior VP Sales and Marketing Scott Neal said the range of the G650 was a perfect fit for the Australian and Asia Pacific market.
“We’ve seen a lot of interest and success in our large cabin, long range aircraft because of the geographic location of Australia,” he said.
“We’ve seen success with our 450 and 550 and we have very high expectations for our G650.
With an estimated market share of 46% in the Asia Pacific region, Gulfstream knows they have to provide the service and support facilities for what is proving a burgeoning market compared with other global regions.
“We have by far leading market share in the Asia Pacific region, so we’ve done very well with the Gulfstream fleet,” Neal said. “Because of that we’re investing so much in people and places, locations in Asia Pacific.
“We’re not going to go and deliver airplanes into a region where we can’t support them. We’re very strong believers that service and support sells airplanes, so if we see a region growing around the world, we’re going to invest to support that market.”
According to Neal, the secret to selling business jets is having a high dispatch rate, so the aircraft are always ready to go.
“We lead the industry [in dispatch reliability] because we invest in that part of the business more than anybody else. We have a very robust system for tracking, evaluating and addressing the reliability of the entire fleet. We have dedicated teams for each model of aircraft and they meet every day of the week. It’s a team called RQAAT, Reliability, Quality, Availability Action Team.
“They look at any issues the fleet may have had, they try to address what happened and they address how to fix it. That’s what keeps our reliability rates above anybody else.
“It’s the continuing dedication and investment in making sure the airplanes do what we say they will do, and delivering the highest reliability and availability rates.
Neal believes Gulfstream’s design ethos has produced aircraft that will fulfil several customer needs.
“We try to design and build aircraft that will deliver a certain combination of performance and comfort, and we think we’ve done very well in the product line. We don’t look to ‘single-point’ design an aircraft, so we don’t just build a big cabin airplane or we don’t just build a fast airplane. We try to build aircraft that will deliver a really good balance of those two things.
“The G650 was a customer designed aircraft. They told us what they wanted, they told us what they wanted it to do and we engaged them with our engineers and designers and we came up with the G650. So it wasn’t Gulfstream throwing a design at the market, we really took the input from our customers of an airplane that they wanted.”