The National Business Aviation Association has named its 2026 Business Aviation Top 40 Under 40 — the annual recognition honoring young professionals shaping the industry’s future. Now in its ninth year, the award is part of NBAA’s Young Professionals in Business Aviation (YoPro) program, with recipients selected by the NBAA YoPro Council from hundreds of nominations submitted by industry peers. The 2026 nomination period closed May 18, 2026, with selection taking place in June and recipients notified confidentially in July, ahead of the public announcement leading into the NBAA Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition (NBAA-BACE) in Las Vegas.
The full list of 2026 recipients is available at nbaa.org.
What the Award Recognizes
The Top 40 Under 40 was created in 2018 to highlight professionals under 40 who are driving meaningful change across business aviation — and it has grown into one of the industry’s more competitive recognitions.
The scale of nominations tells that story. NBAA received 550 nominations in 2023, a record at the time, followed by 702 in 2024 — meaning selection rates have run in the range of one in seventeen.
Candidates are nominated by other industry members rather than applying themselves, and final recipients are chosen by the YoPro Council, a group of business aviation professionals and NBAA staff liaisons working to build connections among the industry’s emerging leaders. The council meets at NBAA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters each June to review the field.
Recipients are required to keep their selection confidential until NBAA releases the full list — companies and individuals may not announce it early on social media or elsewhere, which is why the recognitions tend to arrive as a wave of announcements once the list goes public.
The Nine Categories
Part of what distinguishes this award is its breadth. Business aviation is often reduced in public perception to pilots and airplanes, but the categories reflect how many disciplines actually keep the industry running:
- Airport Business
- Broker/Sales
- Business Management
- Flight/Cabin Attendant
- Innovation and Technology
- Maintenance
- Marketing
- Pilot
- Scheduler/Dispatcher
Recognizing schedulers, dispatchers, cabin attendants, maintenance technicians, and marketing professionals alongside pilots matters more than it might appear. Business aviation’s workforce challenges extend well beyond the flight deck, and awards that make non-pilot career paths visible do quiet work in a sector competing for talent against every other industry.
How Recipients Are Evaluated
Nominations are assessed against several criteria:
Career success. Nominations must cite specific, measurable examples of exceptional achievement — evidence the candidate has gone beyond advancing their own career to advance the industry.
Leadership. Demonstrated ability to lead, whether formally or through influence within an organization or the broader community.
Community involvement and volunteerism. Contribution back to the industry and the community, which NBAA weighs alongside professional accomplishment.
The emphasis on giving back is deliberate. The award isn’t structured purely as a performance ranking — it’s designed to identify people who are building the industry’s future rather than only their own position in it.
Why This Matters Beyond the Recipients
An awards list can look like industry self-congratulation. This one does something more useful.
It makes career paths visible. Business aviation has a recruitment problem rooted substantially in awareness — the same constraint driving the pilot and maintenance technician shortages across aviation generally. A young person weighing career options is unlikely to know that scheduling, dispatch, aircraft brokerage, or cabin service are serious professional tracks with advancement. Forty profiles across nine disciplines is a more effective recruiting document than most recruiting documents.
It builds a network. The YoPro program exists to connect emerging leaders, and the award functions as a cohort mechanism. Forty people who meet through the same recognition become a professional network that persists for decades.
It signals what the industry values. Weighting community involvement and volunteerism alongside career metrics tells young professionals something about the expectations of the field they’re entering.
It surfaces where the industry is heading. The Innovation and Technology category in recent years has included people working on advanced air mobility, aviation AI, and electric aircraft — a useful indicator of where business aviation’s next decade is being built.
The Broader Workforce Context
The award lands against a backdrop of sustained workforce pressure across aviation. Boeing projects hundreds of thousands of new pilots and maintenance technicians will be needed globally over the next two decades, and the constraint on maintenance technicians in particular is awareness rather than training capacity — roughly a third of A&P school seats nationally sit unfilled.
Business aviation competes for the same people as the airlines, and often with less public visibility. Programs that identify and celebrate young professionals — and that make the industry’s full range of careers legible to people outside it — are part of how that gap gets closed.
That’s the case for taking an awards list seriously: not because the recognition changes the recipients’ careers, but because visible role models across nine disciplines change what the next cohort thinks is possible.
Nominating for 2027
For anyone who works with a young professional deserving of recognition, the nomination form for the 2027 Business Aviation Top 40 Under 40 will be available in Spring 2027, opening in conjunction with the NBAA Leadership Conference.
A few things worth knowing if you plan to nominate:
Candidates don’t nominate themselves — the award relies on peers, colleagues, and supervisors putting names forward.
Specificity wins. The criteria explicitly call for measurable examples of career success. Vague praise competes poorly against concrete accomplishment.
Community involvement counts. A nomination that documents volunteerism, mentorship, and industry contribution alongside professional achievement addresses the full criteria.
Competition is substantial. With nominations exceeding 700 in recent cycles for 40 spots, a thorough, well-documented nomination matters.
The Bottom Line
NBAA’s 2026 Business Aviation Top 40 Under 40 recognizes forty young professionals across nine disciplines — from pilots and maintenance technicians to schedulers, brokers, cabin attendants, and technologists — selected by the YoPro Council from a large field of peer nominations.
The full 2026 recipient list is available through NBAA, and individual recipients and their employers typically announce in the weeks following the release.
For an industry facing a genuine talent pipeline challenge, the most valuable thing about the list may not be the recognition it confers, but the picture it presents to anyone outside business aviation wondering whether there’s a career in it. Forty answers, across nine different kinds of work, is a reasonably persuasive one.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the NBAA Business Aviation Top 40 Under 40 award? The Business Aviation Top 40 Under 40 is an annual award from the National Business Aviation Association recognizing forty professionals under age 40 who are driving innovation and shaping the future of business aviation. Established in 2018, it is part of NBAA’s Young Professionals in Business Aviation (YoPro) program. Recipients are selected by the NBAA YoPro Council from nominations submitted by other industry members.
What categories does the Top 40 Under 40 cover? There are nine nomination categories: Airport Business, Broker/Sales, Business Management, Flight/Cabin Attendant, Innovation and Technology, Maintenance, Marketing, Pilot, and Scheduler/Dispatcher. The breadth reflects the range of disciplines that make up business aviation beyond the flight deck.
How are Top 40 Under 40 recipients selected? Candidates are nominated by peers, colleagues, or supervisors rather than applying themselves. Nominations are reviewed by the NBAA YoPro Council, which meets at NBAA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters in June to select the forty recipients. Evaluation criteria include measurable career success, leadership, and community involvement and volunteerism. Recipients are notified confidentially in July and must keep the honor private until NBAA publicly releases the full list ahead of NBAA-BACE.
How competitive is the NBAA Top 40 Under 40? Highly. NBAA received 550 nominations in 2023 and 702 in 2024, both records at the time, for forty available recognitions — a selection rate of roughly one in seventeen. Nominations are evaluated on specific, measurable evidence of achievement rather than general endorsement.
How do I nominate someone for the 2027 Top 40 Under 40? The nomination form for the 2027 Business Aviation Top 40 Under 40 will be available in Spring 2027, opening in conjunction with the NBAA Leadership Conference. Nominations should include specific, measurable examples of the candidate’s career success along with evidence of leadership and community involvement. Full criteria and the nomination form are posted at nbaa.org.
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