Sounding Board: Five Minutes With Lannie O’Bannion, Textron Aviation SVP Of Sales, Flight Ops

Lannie O’Bannion is Textron Aviation’s senior vice president of sales and flight operations. In his role, he leads the company’s global commercial aircraft sales, pre-owned sales, pro-ownership, flight operations and business development functions. O’Bannion joined the company, then Cessna Aircraft Co., in 1997 and has held a number of positions. Most recently he previously served as vice president of North America customer service centers.

Q. How has the market been for Textron Aviation aircraft and what regions are the strongest? 

A. We continue to see a strong market globally for all of our products, including our pistons, our turboprops and the Citations.

When you break it down by region, North America and Canada continue to be our strongest market, where we focus on a lot of our sales activity. Europe has always been a strong market for us and within Europe, Germany is really the strongest country, where we see a lot of activity with turboprops and Citations. In Latin America, we also focus a lot of sales activity there. Within Latin America, Brazil is one of our strongest countries that we focus on.

Brazil historically has been a great Citation country for us, but we also are seeing very strong turboprop activity, both with the Caravan and the King Airs. The last region of the world that we focus on is APAC, even though this is a smaller percentage, but we spend a lot of time, and we have a strong sales team in this region. There’s a lot of excitement about what we’re doing at Textron Aviation in the region.

Q. You mentioned that you are tracking indicators, such as flight hours of Textron Aviation’s fleet and other metrics. How are they stacking up?

A. We’re tracking the flight hours (of Textron Aviation’s active fleet) in 2024, and they’re tracking very similar to ’23—’23 was a great market, so that’s reassuring that we’re in a strong market because people are flying. We’re tracking these hours month to month. We’re also watching the charter, fractional world and customers are continuing to fly charter; they’re continuing to buy into the fractional program. And we’re still seeing concept customers into our product line—first-time buyers are buying into full aircraft ownership. These are all indicators that the market is strong. Then the other indicator we look at is the pre-owned and there continues to be strong demand for pre-owned aircraft. We’re seeing a little bit of an uptick in availability, but it’s nothing concerning because the pricing for these products continues to be very, very high. The residuals for our customers when they’re looking to sell to buy new, they’re seeing strong values for their existing products.

Q. The industry is grappling with supply chain issues. What are you seeing there?

A. Supply chain is getting better, but through the whole process of working with multiple suppliers, we always have things that pop up. We’ve got one of the strongest supply chain teams in the industry, and they are fully committed and dedicated to working with our suppliers to get them healthy so that we can maintain our production rates. They continue to do on-site visits.

Q. Are there any particular components or parts that are the most challenging? 

A. There’s some raw materials that continue to be challenging. But we are working with our suppliers to overcome those obstacles if those do pop up.

Q. Textron Aviation is exhibiting at EBACE. What precautions, if any, are you taking in light of last year’s protesters at EBACE?

A. NBAA has told us that they increased their security. We will have our people trained. It will have security on site—our own security. We’ll have training should something like that happen again. We will have our team fully trained on how to react. It’s always better to plan for the worse case and hopefully nothing happens.

Q. Why is it important for Textron Aviation to exhibit at EBACE, especially in light of two large OEMs deciding not to attend. 

A. Europe’s a big market for us, and we sell a lot of aircraft in Europe. Going to the show is very important to us. We were at Aero (Friedrichshafen) just a few weeks ago, and we are committed to being there for our customers. From me leading sales, I get excited to interface with our customers and be able to show them products on the ramp and to actually be there physically. It’s well attended for our European customers as well as Middle East. We see some folks from different parts of the world traveling there to attend the show. So, we are committed. We have aircraft on display, we have a chalet so our customers are interfaced with our service folks to understand what we can offer them from a service perspective. We also have a customer event party to maximize our interface with our customers during this time period, and it’s proven to be successful.

Q. Textron Aviation, then Cessna Aircraft Co., announced in 2015 that it was entering the large-cabin market with the introduction of the Citation Hemisphere. It suspended those plans in 2019 because of challenges with the Safran Silvercrest engine. Has the company given any thought about making another attempt at entering the large-cabin market? 

A. We looked at that with the Hemisphere, but our focus right now is in the segments that we’re in. There’s just a lot of aircraft in that (large aircraft) space. We like to focus in areas that we are successful, and we can invest our investment dollars on those particular products.

Q. Sustainability is a key focus of industry events, such as EBACE, NBAA and other functions. Textron Aviation is engaged with the industry on sustainability efforts.  How receptive are your customers to flying sustainably? Are more of them getting on board with it?

A. We’re always focused on sustainability. I feel like that’s just part of our DNA now. We’re always talking about it. If customers want to engage with us on sustainability, we can talk to them about it. All of our turbines are SAF approved. We have offset programs we can offer them. If somebody is very strong on sustainability, we will work with them on how to manage through that process. There’s different pockets and segments that are more interested in it. Some customers are less interested in it, but at the end of the day, we have the ability to talk to them wherever they’re at, if it’s full sustainability, or they’re just learning about it, we can help them through the process. As we design new airplanes, we always looking at how do we make them more efficient.