Airbus

Airbus Corporate Jets began in 1997 as an answer to Boeing, and the method has not changed: take a certified airliner, then fit it out privately.

Airbus showed the programme that became Airbus Corporate Jets at the Paris Air Show in 1997, starting with the A319CJ. Boeing had opened its own business-jet division the year before, and the ACJ programme was a direct answer to it. The approach has not changed since: take an airliner that is already certified, add auxiliary tanks in the hold, and fit a cabin at a fraction of airline seating density. Nothing is drawn from scratch. The engineering question is what to take out and what to put in, not what to design.

Airbus occupies exactly one category in this fleet, VIP Airliner, and both of its aircraft sit in it. That is the practical meaning of the programme: these are not business jets that happen to be large, they are airliners that were never fitted with rows of seats. What they offer is floor area, arranged as separate zones for meeting, eating and sleeping, not as one continuous tube of chairs. They are taken for room, not for pace, and a reader weighing them against a purpose-built business jet is weighing two different kinds of aeroplane.