What business aviation delivered in 2025, read from the ramp

GAMA counted 854 business jet deliveries in 2025, up 11.8 percent on the year before, with total industry billings of 35.7 billion dollars, up 14.6 percent. From where we stand, the interesting number is not the growth. It is that every one of those aircraft arrived with a finish that had never been washed by anyone.

This is not a market report. It is what a delivery year looks like from the ramp.

The numbers, for the record

From GAMA’s 2025 annual shipment data:

• Business jets: 854 units, up 11.8 percent
• Turboprops: 594 units, down 5.1 percent
• Pistons: 1,782 units, up 10 units
• Total airplane shipments: 3,230
• Total aircraft delivery billings: 35.7 billion dollars, up 14.6 percent
• Airplane delivery billings: 31.0 billion dollars, up 16.1 percent

Billings rising faster than unit count is the part worth noticing. That is mix, and it means more large-cabin aircraft in the total. Larger aircraft means more surface area, more interior, more brightwork and more of everything we do per airframe.

What a delivery year looks like from the ramp

An aircraft coming out of a completion center is at the single most fragile moment of its finish life, and almost nobody treats it that way.

The topcoat is new. Polyurethane topcoat systems for aircraft cure over a period that manufacturers describe in hours for airworthiness and that MROs describe in weeks for chemical and abrasion resistance. PPG publishes a dry to fly figure for Desothane HS that runs as long as 90 hours at 20 degrees depending on activator. Duncan Aviation’s exterior finish guidance says high-quality urethane finishes require a 30-day period before washing and waxing.

Those are two different milestones and the gap between them is where new aircraft get hurt. An aircraft is legal to fly long before its finish is ready to be worked on. We wrote the whole thing up in new paint, and how long before anyone should touch it.

The other thing about a delivery aircraft: it has protective film on it, it has been through a completion facility with other trades working around it, and it is about to be inspected by a buyer’s representative whose job is to find things. That is a specific kind of work and it is not the same as a wash. It is delivery and acceptance preparation, and the difference is what the person is looking for.

What rising deliveries actually change for an operator

Three things, and none of them are obvious from the headline.

Completion center schedules tighten. When deliveries climb, the shops doing interiors, paint and completions are fuller, and the queue for a refurbishment slot lengthens. Which means the marginal value of maintaining what you have goes up, because the alternative has a longer wait attached to it.

New aircraft on the ramp raise the visible bar. This sounds soft and it is not. When the aircraft parked next to yours at the FBO is eighteen months old, your aircraft is being compared to it by every passenger who walks past both.

The first year of care sets the next ten. A finish that gets correctly handled through its first year, protected once it is cured, and washed on an interval matched to where it lives, ages differently from one that gets a pressure washer at day 20 because it looked dusty. That divergence is not recoverable later. Correction spends film thickness, and there is 50 to 75 microns of it.

Where we sit in it

We work with completion centers and OEMs as well as with owners, which means we see the same airframe at both ends: the week it leaves the shop, and again five years later when somebody wants to know why the paint on one aircraft in a fleet of three looks different from the other two.

It is almost never the paint. It is what happened to it in the first year.

The thing to actually do about it

If you have an aircraft on order or arriving, decide now who is touching it first and what they are permitted to do. The answer to how soon can it be washed is a real answer with a real number behind it, and nobody at a delivery is thinking about it because there are forty other things happening that day.

If it would help to have that written down before the aircraft arrives, ask us and we will put it in a page you can hand to whoever is on the ramp.