Business jets and utility turboprops

Four manufacturers account for most of what sits on an FBO apron, and each has a family tell that saves you reading the titles.

Cessna Citation

The largest family by number and the one most often mis-identified, because it spans forty years. The early Citations and the whole CJ line (M2, CJ3+, CJ4) keep a straight wing and a T-tail — docile, slow for a jet, and very common. The Citation X, Sovereign, Latitude and Longitude are the swept-wing generation, bigger and much faster, with the Latitude and Longitude offering a flat cabin floor.

Gulfstream

Count the windows: large oval cabin windows in a row are the Gulfstream signature, and no competitor copies them. A T-tail, a long swept wing and winglets from the G550 onward. The G650 and G700 have a wider cabin cross-section and a more raked windscreen than the GIV/G450 generation.

Bombardier

Learjet — the smallest and the most obviously 1960s in its lines. Wingtip fuel tanks date a 20 or 30-series; the 45/70/75 are the modern ones. Production has ended.
Challenger 300/350/3500 and the wide Challenger 600/604/650 — the latter's fuselage is the one Bombardier stretched into the CRJ airliner, which is why a Challenger on the ramp looks like a very short regional jet.
Global 5000/6000/7500/8000 — the large, long-wing, intercontinental end.

Embraer

The Phenom 100 and 300 are the light jets — the 300 has led light-jet deliveries for years. The Praetor 500/600 are bigger and carry winglets. The Legacy 600/650 is an ERJ 135 airliner fuselage with a business interior and extra fuel, and it still looks like the regional jet it came from.

Dassault Falcon

Three engines is the instant Falcon: the Falcon 900, 7X and 8X mount a third engine in the tail, which nothing else in business aviation still does. The Falcon 2000 and 6X are twins, and the whole family shares a short, strongly curved nose.

Seen from behind, with the engines on the rear fuselage either side. Dassault is the only manufacturer still building a three-engined business jet, so a third intake at the base of the fin names the aircraft before you can read anything on it.

A Dassault Falcon 8X on approach seen from the side, with engines on the rear fuselage and a duct fairing running up into the base of the tail fin — A Dassault Falcon 8X on approach. Two nacelles sit on the rear fuselage like many business jets — the Falcon tell is the dark fairing sweeping up into the fin root, which is the intake duct feeding a third engine buried in the tail.Photo: Matti Blume · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Turboprops and utility aircraft

Beechcraft King Air 200/260/360 — twin turboprop with a T-tail. The 90-series is the same idea with a conventional tail.
Pilatus PC-12 — a single turboprop with a large rear cargo door and distinctive winglets, used for everything from air ambulance to freight. The PC-24 is the jet built around the same cargo door and rough-field gear.
Cessna Caravan / Grand Caravan EX — fixed gear, long fuselage, often a belly cargo pod, and fitted with floats or skis about as often as wheels. The workhorse of small freight, skydiving and island routes.
Beechcraft 1900D — the small horizontal "tailets" and the stub stabilons on the rear fuselage give it away instantly; the older Beech 99 is the plain-tailed commuter that preceded it.

Spotting business aviation

These aircraft park at the FBO, not at gates, so the viewing position that works for airliners is usually the wrong one. They are also the part of the fleet most likely to be missing from a tracker: several national programmes let owners suppress their registration from public feeds, so an unfiltered source like ADS-B Exchange shows more than the mainstream trackers do. Looking up a tail number in a public register such as the FAA's is entirely legal; publishing a named individual's movements from it is a different question, and worth thinking about before you post.

See also airliners, light aircraft and flight tracking.

Photographs and references

For photographs of the real thing, Wikimedia Commons' business jets category is freely licensed and very large, and planespotters.net pairs its photos with each individual airframe's build date, operator history and fate. Business aviation is thinner on the enthusiast databases than airliners are, simply because these aircraft park where the public cannot stand; the manufacturers' own press galleries are often the clearest images of a current model.