The Sky's The Limit: E-Shopping For Airplanes.

Five years ago, the idea of marketing pre-owned aircraft over the Internet was greeted with as much skepticism as Wilbur and Orville Wright's first flights at Kitty Hawk. The aviation community generally dismissed the notion that a buyer would spring for a used Cessna 182 or Piper Cherokee, much less a business or transport jet, without going through traditional print or word-of-mouth channels. Naysayers considered the Web appropriate for $20 books but not for flying machines with price tags of $40,000 and up.

How rapidly things change. Today, there are over half a dozen online venues advertising pre-owned aircraft, attracting ads from well over half the dealers and brokers in North America. Only a few months ago, an ad on Aircraft Shopper Online led directly to the sale of an ultra-deluxe Gulfstream V business jet worth more than $35 million -- a transaction believed to be the largest of its kind facilitated by an online ad. Many dealers report that over 50 percent of the aircraft sales they now close are the product of leads generated by Internet classifieds.

Developments like these signify a fundamental change in the way that used airplanes are bought and sold. At the least, the Web is gaining ground in promoting aircraft sales because its accessibility, searchability and real-time information capabilities overcome many of the inherent deficiencies of print ads. At its best, it has turned into a proactive matchmaker between aircraft buyers and sellers.

Friendly Cyber-Skies

The first online advertising services for used aircraft emerged in the mid-1990s with the promise of providing a faster, nimbler alternative to print advertising. As Web technology has matured, increasingly sophisticated point-and-click searches and other unique browser-based features have delivered on that early promise.

One key advantage of using the Web to sell pre-owned aircraft is timeliness. Instead of letting expensive aircraft sit on the tarmac until the next edition of an aircraft magazine hits the streets, sellers can now spread the word through cyberspace almost immediately and thus accelerate the process of turning their aviation assets into cash. They can also update listings in real time rather than waiting for next month's issue. Buyers, for their part, can avoid wasting their time studying ads for aircraft that may have sold even before the ink hit the paper, and they no longer risk missing or losing an ad because of a misplaced magazine.

Online ads also offer the benefit of accommodating much more information than their print counterparts. Without the space constraints of print, an aircraft ad can contain everything from photographs to air time, inspection history, specifications and the kind of interior and exterior descriptions one might find in a house listing, allowing sellers to fully flaunt their wares and improving buyers' ability to pinpoint aircraft of interest.

Perhaps most important, Internet technology has eliminated the need for buyers to scour every page of a print publication to find the aircraft they seek. In many cases, aircraft magazines list planes for sale by dealer, forcing shoppers to slog through hundreds of irrelevant listings in hope of unearthing the occasional Beech Bonanza 33 or Aerostar 601 P. With the search engines on today's Web sites, buyers can instead request a list of all available aircraft by model and receive the answer in seconds. This saves considerable time and ensures that shoppers do not overlook a good prospect during the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack search of magazine ads. Some sites also permit power searches that make it possible to sort by any criteria, including air time, price, and even aircraft located within any specified distance.

Getting Personal

New advances in online buying and selling guides are simplifying the aircraft marketing process even further by harnessing the power of the Internet to cater to individual needs. New personalization features are delivering the kind of one-on-one marketing capabilities that helped put Amazon.com on the e-map.

Some sites now offer an automated personal shopping service that allows shoppers to create detailed profiles of the aircraft they wish to purchase and then alerts them via e-mail as soon as planes that fit the profile become available. A single click from within the e-mail takes the buyer to a detailed description and photos of the aircraft; another click links the buyer directly to the seller. This frees buyers from the need to keep checking the site and also ensures that they can act immediately when a suitable aircraft comes on the market.

One of these sites also allows users to tag ads for aircraft that interest them, displays icons to quickly pinpoint those tagged ads whenever users return to the site, and also highlights ads that have been changed or added since their last visit. Users can instantly generate lists of tagged ads to avoid scrolling through listings they have already rejected. They can also append notes to any listing, just as they would in a print magazine -- with the advantage that their annotations are not lost with a new print issue.

Online Middleman 

Even with the advent of these online listing services and the new features they continually add, the aircraft market still retains the personal contact many feared would be lost in the Internet environment. The seller still negotiates directly with the buyer. One site, in fact, immediately e-mails or faxes the seller as soon as a potential buyer expresses interest in a particular aircraft. The lead can be forwarded along with the buyer name, phone number, e-mail address, budget and pilot qualifications, delivering the most highly targeted prospect possible.

As in so many other cases in different industries, then, the Web functions as a sophisticated lead-generating tool that simplifies the process of bringing aircraft buyers and sellers together. Sites that focus on this activity can be regarded as the eBays of the aviation world.

In retrospect, anyone with a thorough understanding of both the aircraft market and the Web could have predicted that they were made for each other. The immediacy and the information-massaging capabilities of the Internet make it an ideal medium for meeting the needs of the aviation community. Despite the relatively high cost of the aircraft itself, the process of buying or selling a pre-owned airplane comes down to a shopping experience, and the Internet makes that experience infinitely easier for all parties.

Tony Friend is CEO of Aircraft Shopper Online (www.ASO.com), an online source for used transport, personal and business aircraft.