Traffic has dropped at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and that’s a quantifiable symptom of the general malaise in business aviation, according to a story in the Hackensack Record. Although movements at TEB, the busiest business airport in the U.S., were up year over year, traffic flattened and then declined in the end of the year. It was off by 3.6 percent in October and December and 1.4 percent in November. To those in the industry, it’s indicative of a slowdown in the recovery that was widely hoped to be firmly established going into 2012. “We’ve definitely seen a flattening in the fall of 2011 and it’s continued into 2012,” said Ken Forester, CEO of a Teterboro-based Meridian, which manages 23 corporate and private aircraft. “I assume it’s related to the overall economy. I think there is more uncertainty than there was a year ago.”
NBAA’s Dan Hubbard agreed with Forester, saying the downward trend at TEB is “indicative of what’s going on nationally.” Some analysts suggested the European debt crisis had an impact on the rate of recovery in the industry. Forester said there is intense price competition as companies like his compete for a more rate-conscious clientele. “We are happy with the way things are going as long as this dip is temporary,” he told the Record.
