It’s hard to believe a year has passed since we last ventured to Orlando for the annual NBAA confab. I’ve always looked forward to these trips—meeting up with old friends in the industry (hey, you look great!); catching up on the latest gossip (maybe I’ll share); and renewing the believe that this industry just may be the best ever (I like to say “wouldn’t change a thing, but we have some serious problems this year).

So when the JetBlue flight left HPN 10 minutes ahead of schedule and before the snow and rain hit New England, I thought this was a sign of good things to come. The airplane was full of NBAA’ers — John J. McGraw-Hill’s chief pilot and aviation director; Matt Greene from SafeFlight; Steve Philips from FlightSafety and my seatmate, Bob Murtha, business and operations manager for IBM’s flight ops. Someone made a joke before we got on the airplane about what the mood would be in Orlando and just how many people would show up — well, he said there are five of us, I guess we can have a conference.

I remember last year sitting in the NBAA press room having lunch and watching the CNN reports on the TV about the tumbling stock market. I asked Cassandra Bosco to turn it off because it was the first day of the show and judging from the “dropped jaws” on the folks sitting around the table, we were in for a rough show.

Fast forward and here we are again, and the market has recovered somewhat, but business aviation has taken quite a hit in a year. Last week U.S. Congressman Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) introduced a bill he says is designed to boost the sales of general aviation aircraft. It’s called the General Aviation Jobs Act and would extend the current bonus depreciation allowance for another two years, and shorten the recovery period for noncommercial aircraft property from five to three years. The current depreciation tax provision is set to expire by year-end. If he can generate support for the bill and gets it passed, it could help the industry on the road to recovery. Make sure you let your elected officials know that you support Rep. Tiahrt bill.

Oh, don’t forget the check out what George Larson and Bill Garvey are up to during the show.

-- Jessica Salerno