“People in China love Warren,” Hansell said. “Having his picture on an advertisement at one of our functions and so forth is a good thing.”
‘Robust Growth’
Hansell is optimistic about the prospects for the U.S. economy three to five years from now, he told Bloomberg Television’s Betty Liu in an interview today.
“We’re going to be in good shape at that point,” he said. “We’ll come through this, what’s been kind of a sluggish period, and I think we’ll be seeing some robust growth.”
Hansell said he’s looking beyond the budget stalemate in Washington where U.S. lawmakers are working to reach a budget compromise to avoid more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts starting next year.
“When we purchase these aircraft, they’re coming for a long, long time,” he told Liu. “We’re not looking at what’s going to happen in January or necessarily what’s going to happen in 2013. We’re looking well out in the future.”
NetJets is also updating its fleet of small- and medium- cabin aircraft, agreeing to buy as many as 275 Bombardier Challenger models, 150 of Cessna’s Citation Latitude jets and 125 Embraer Phenoms in deals announced from 2010 through June.
The orders account for the “lion’s share” of what NetJets plans to buy in the years ahead, Hansell said from Columbus. NetJets has been able to leverage the scale of its orders to win more favorable terms on pricing and maintenance from planemakers, he said.
“The overall packages that we worked out, we were quite pleased with,” Hansell said. “And we think they were, too.”