August 20, 2025 • 18 mins
Have you ever thought about buying your own plane? It may not be as out of reach as you imagine. Sure, it’s not cheap, with maintenance, fuel, repair, and hangar costs, but the private aviation industry wants you to know there's a plane for nearly every budget.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
I wish the packet fla and to this cat, just
like the dragonfly.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
On the cheets, over the seats on the grease, to
anywhere up.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Please, have you ever wondered what it was like to
own your own private plane? It may not be as
out of reach as you imagine. Sure, some people spend
fifty million dollars or more, but there's a plane for
nearly every budget. Let's speak with Preston Holland. He's the
founder of Prestige Aircraft Finance. He also hosts a weekly
(00:50):
private aviation podcast called the VIPC and his author of
the newsletter Private Jet Insider, which provides advice and straties
to help clients navigate private aviation. All right, so let's
just keep it simple. Do I need to be a
billionaire to own my own plane?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Berry? You don't need to be a billionaire, and actually
most of my clients are not billionaires. In order to
own an aircraft, one that you're going to sit in
the back and you're going to have flown professionally for you. Typically,
what I'm seeing is a net worth is somewhere between
one hundred and two hundred million dollars as kind of
the starting point, and so not only is net worth
(01:31):
something to consider, but also what does this do for
my tax strategy and tax planning? How am I going
to use bonus appreciation to my benefit? There's a lot
of other things that come with this, and how much
cashload does my business spin off? But generally speaking, when
we're thinking about that, it's really in one hundred to
two hundred million dollar mark before you're starting to buy
(01:52):
something like a light jet or maybe a mid sized jet.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
There are a handful of watches you can buy in
a handful of very specific sports cars that sell for
more on the secondary market than MSRP. My assumption with
jets is that there's depreciation in the used market, not appreciation.
Is that a factor here or do most of these
(02:15):
jets go through the normal straight line depreciation process like
a boat? As the hours head up.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The answer is generally yes to that. Let me add
two caveats. One is coded and if you watch the
valuation of aircraft between twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen and twenty
twenty one, they appreciated significantly. So there's a lot of
people that were selling their airplanes in twenty twenty one
for what they bought or more than what they bought
(02:42):
in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen. So general market trends definitely
matters in this scenario. Generally speaking, over a lifetime, there
is a real depreciation factor. You sell for less than
what you bought it for, and the only nuance to
that is in a few make and models and in
a very short period of time post delivery. So right now,
(03:04):
if you look at the overall ecosystem, I can think of,
off the top of my head three models in which
that's happening, and they're driven by a few kind of
different forces. One is the Phenom three hundred. The Phenom
three hundred is an excellent light aircraft, and it is
loved by charter operators, it's loved by owners, and the
contract price that you bought it for two years ago
(03:25):
while you waited in line. Oftentimes you can take possession
of it and you flip it immediately and actually get
a premium above and beyond that market. Specifically, it's happening
a lot. The Prader five hundred and the Prayder six hundred,
which are also Number A product, are experiencing similar but
not quite as dramatic to that. The PC twelve market
has experienced that over the last couple of years. The
(03:47):
wait list for a lot of PC twelve is five years.
If you wanted to buy a brand new PC twelve
right now and you've got in line, you'd be waiting
for five years. And so for the first couple of
years you may be able to fly for a little
bit and then get out of it a little higher
than what you have.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I imagine the range of private aircraft is very different from
what I see in luxury automobiles. The sizes vary a lot,
how many people they can carry, how far they can fly,
how fast they can go, How broad are the ranges
of private planes, and how big is the price range
(04:24):
from small regional planes to cross atlantic type jets.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, Barry, let me start with the ratio of size
to range, because those two things actually play with each other.
You have light jets, which are usually really good for
regional travel. So this is for people who are flying
from Atlanta to Charleston, West Virginia, or the people flying
from New York to Chicago. Right, not terribly far as
(04:50):
the crow flies. Those light jets, you know, are not
necessarily going to do cross country type activities, but they're
going to be really good for that. When you're thinking
about how much am I going to spend? There's also
a very wide range. I would say, just to give
you a really broad range, your kind of get in
price for a jet, and this is you're talking pretty old,
(05:14):
pretty small, is going to be around a million to
two million dollars, and the top end of the market
is going to be what Jeff Bezos just took delivery of,
which is a G seven hundred at seventy five million
dollars sticker. And it's everything in between.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
What are the other costs and responsibilities beyond the purchase price?
What do people who purchase a plane what do they
need to think about and budget for.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
So the framework to think about this is the difference
between fixed costs and variable cost In the same way,
if you're going to draw the boat analogy, whether you
vote one day a year or three hundred and sixty
five days a year, there's a certain set of costs
that are constant and you're going to have to pay
them whether you use it a lot or you don't
use it. We refer to those as fixed costs, right,
(06:01):
So whenever you see somebody say what's the fixed costs
airplane that is typically CREWE expense, so that is your
pilot expense. That is your training expense, because your pilots
have to be trained in the aircraft. There's aircraft management,
which is you're paying a company, a third party company
to basically it's a property manager for your jet. That
is the best comparison. It's not a one for one comparison,
(06:23):
but it's pretty close. The hangar cost. So you're in
New York, I'm sorry to break it to you, but
hangar cost in your neck of the woods is very expensive.
But hangar costs you got to pay it whether you're
whether you're flying the airplane or not. Your insurance cost
that's going to be a percentage of full value, liability value,
things like that, and then there's some other miscellaneous fees.
There's subscriptions, there's naves, there's things like that. That fixed
(06:46):
cost will range in the kind of light jet world
four hundred to five hundred thousand dollars a year. And
then when you get up into the large aircraft, you
may have fixed costs north of a million dollars. If
you have to have multiple captains for your aircraft, fly
a lot things like that.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
What are the variable costs?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Like, So, when you talk about variable costs, you touched
on an important fact, which is the fuel. There is
jet a fuel which is much more expensive than what
you put into your car. And there are ways to
mitigate that. You can get fuel contracts to get you
a discount, but it kind of is what it is.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
You actually pay six seven dollars a gallon something like that.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Somewhere in there. Depends on what part of the country.
It can be as low as five and a half.
It can be as high as eight and a half.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Five and a half, I'll put it into my car.
So I mean, I'm okay with that. People don't realize
when you're flying a jet, even regionally, you're burning through
hundreds of gallons, if not thousands of gallons of fuel.
What is the hourly fuel cost for a mid sized jet?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, So I actually I have a tool that a
friend of mine build is called Obvia cost, and I
use that to do all my calculations. So the citation XLS,
which burns two hundred and twenty seven gallons per hour,
you give this CJ four which burns one hundred and
ninety eight gallons per hour. The Challenger three hundred, which
burns two hundred and eighty gallons per hour. Once you
(08:06):
start getting up into your large aircraft, let's say your
Global five thousand, which is an aircraft that can easily
do New York to London. They can do New York
to Paris, you're burning four hundred and ninety gallons of
fuel per hour. So it ranges significantly on how much
fuel you're burning. There's also in the fuel burn. It's
not a one to one you're not going to save
a lot of money. But if you're going faster and
(08:28):
burning more fuel, like there's a coefficient there. There's some
math to do. But for instance, right if we assume
six dollars and twenty five cents per hour, the Global
five thousand is burning three thousand dollars of fuel per hour.
Very where do we want to travel on our Global.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
New York to ls What New York to la.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
All right, So we're going to leave out of Teeterborough
Airport because we are not going to deal with the
port authority and we're going to go to John Wayne
which is SNA YEP because we're also not going to
deal with LAX. We're going to take four people with us.
We're going to fly the globe five thousand. It is
twenty one hundred miles nautical miles. It's going to take
us four hours and forty minutes approximately in the global
(09:09):
five thousand, and we are going to have seven thousand
dollars of variable costs per hour. Our total trip variable
cost is going to be thirty eight thousand, two hundred
and eighty one dollars to go from New York to.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
LA We're talking about fuel costs. We haven't talked about
maintenance costs. If you're flying one hundred hours a year
and you have a jet, what can you expect in
maintenance expenses assuming nothing goes wrong.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah, so a lot of times maintenance is actually calculated
on an hourly basis, So you're buying into a program.
There is not a direct correlation to this in the
real world. The closest it would be is to an
insurance product, but you're paying on a consumption basis. So
let's say I am signed up for a maintenance program.
(09:58):
A maintenance platform them is called JSSI Jets Services Solutions, Inc.
They have one hundred percent coverage for my engines. That's
going to amortize my overhaul costs, which can be a
couple of million bucks that has to happen every twenty
five hundred or five thousand hours. It's going to amortize
it on a per hour basis, so I pay per
hour I pay to the service, and then they pay
(10:20):
my chunky maintenance bills. Those engine programs very pretty significantly
depending on how much coverage. You can also put coverage
on the parts on the aircraft program called pro parts,
where you're paying an hourly cost. And then they're basically
they're taking the other side of the bet that you're
going to have less maintenance, and you're taking the front
(10:41):
side of the bet that says I'm going to have
a lot of maintenance and they're going to pay for it.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Or just that I want to have a fixed set
of costs and don't have to worry about the you know,
possible surprises, and willing to pay a little more upfront exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, you're willing to pay kind of stretched out over
time as opposed to large chucks. So instead of paying
your two million dollars over halls, you're going to pay
you know, let's say one thousand, two thousand dollars per
hour so generally speaking, if you were to amortize your
maintenance expense over your hourly, which is typically how everybody
calculates us on the Global five thousand that we're talking about,
(11:14):
it's going to be around forty one hundred dollars per hour.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Let's talk a few minutes about jets. If you want
to go across the Atlantic, what sized jet are we
talking about?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah, you're going to have to go into the large
cabin range. You're going to be looking at the gulf
Stream G four fifty to unlock kind of London. I
think it's going to be on the fringe for Paris.
The G five point fifty gets it with no problem,
the gulf Stream G six fifty, the Bombardier Global five thousand,
six thousand, sixty five hundred. There's a lot of numbers
and so that you're really gonna have to get into
(11:46):
that large cabin to comfortably get NonStop from New York
to Paris. And that's gonna, you know, possibly have a
flight attendant. It's going to have at least two pilots.
You're going to have at least one nice sized restroom,
maybe a small rest in the front. So that's really
getting up into your larger cabin aircraft. But that's really
how you're going to be able to get transpontent.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
I recall a few years ago there was a commercial
pilot shortage. I have a buddy who I grew up
with who flies Detroit to South Korea, and he was
telling me they just can't find enough pilots. Does that
same shortage of qualified pilots exist in private aviation as well?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Yeah, So the pilot situation in private and business aviation
has undergone some similar pressures to what it has in
commercial aviation. The price has gone up, the price of
pilots has gone up, the price of training has gone up,
just everything associated with the pilot has gone up. When
(12:45):
you look at kind of the shortage, you have to
remember that every pilot has to go through what's called
a type rating, and every pilot has to go through
what's called recurrent training. So, Barry, if you are qualified
to fly the Gulfstream G six fifty, you have gone
through the initial training, the initial type training, and you
keep that current because you have a client that is,
(13:06):
you know, kind of running through find that aircraft, and
then you have one of his buddies that calls and
says Barry, can you come find my Global five thousand.
You would have to go through the initial type training
and do the recurrent training. Right, every pilot can only
fly so many types of aircraft, and so as you
look at kind of the the quote unquote pilot shortage,
which there's a lot of debate in the industry whether
(13:27):
it even exists or not. If you look at that,
you have to look at type ratings. Now when you're
looking at buying an aircraft. One thing that I advise
clients to do a lot of times is follow the
big dogs. Okay, you've got the big dogs, which is
net Jets. They're the largest Flexjet, which is second largest
Vista Jet, which is pretty large, and then a lot
(13:47):
of the other operators if you follow their make models,
kind of their fleet composition, they train so many pilots.
I mean to put into a perspective for those that follow.
Publicly traded company Berkshire Hathaway owns NetJets and flight Safety.
They just reported an up quarter eight percent revenue growth.
(14:07):
NetJets owns its own training facility. That's how much. That's
how many slots that they were buying in the training facility.
So they will actually leak out pilots for people that
are like, you know what, I don't want to do
the seven days on, seven days off thing, So you know,
feed on three hundred pilots relatively easy to come by.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So someone's thinking about buying a private jet and they're
saying themselves, Gee, this sounds like a lot of responsibility
and a lot of cost, and maybe it's a little
out of their budget. How significant is fractional ownership to
the experience of owning your own jet?
Speaker 2 (14:42):
So fractional is similar, but it sometimes from time to
time will feel a bit more like chartering than owning
your own aircraft. Now, every fractional contract has a slightly
different language in their contracts of what's called all out hours. Barry,
I'm gonna come to me York, and you and I
are going to go for a sushi dinner in La
(15:03):
I know this great spot. We're going to go out there.
If we wanted to leave in two hours. We are
not guaranteed availability on a fractional if we want to
leave in twelve hours. So let's say we want to
leave tomorrow morning, guaranteed availability. And sometimes they will be
able to swing something through and actually get you there.
When you own an airplane, it is waiting for you
at the hangar, and you determine how close your pilots
(15:26):
have to be so that if you want to leave
in twenty minutes, you can do so right. And so
that is the biggest difference in the experience. The other
piece is the hassle that comes with hiring pilots and
managing stuff. I have a lot of billionaire clients and
billionaire friends that say, look, I don't want to mess
with this, I just want the easy button. Fractional is
(15:49):
the easy button. Like, at the end of the day,
you're paying somebody to deal with all the headache, and
you show up and you get on the airplane and
you go You're not having to say, ah, I've got
pilot turnover. It really is the easy button, which is
where that fills in the market. Not only can you
save kind of on your gross cost, but even if
(16:09):
you're flying where it makes sense to fly private, you're
you're negating a lot of that stress.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
So our last question. Someone reaches out to you and says, hey, Preston,
I'm thinking about buying my first plane. What sort of
advice do you give to that person.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Assemble a good transaction team. That is the number one
thing that you have to do. Your transaction team typically
looks like person number one is your broker. They're going
to be your quarterback. It's not dissimilar to buying a
commercial property. If they're going to find the aircraft, they're
going to manage the process. They're going to do all
your pre buy inspections, everything like that too. Your attorney
(16:45):
is probably pretty good in house. They know nothing about
FAA law, So you need to get an aviation specific
attorney the grand scheme of things. That's going to be
similar pricing to any other specialized attorney, but it's going
to make sure you're in how attorney is going to
pull their hair out trying to figure out how to
do this where the aviation attorney's going to be easy. Third,
(17:06):
aviation tax consultant of some sort. There's a few different
firms that specialize in aviation tax. Your CPA probably knows
how to run your books and make sure that everything's good.
They don't understand the concept of truth and leasing and
subleases and leasing between all of the known entities, and
how do you not get flagged by the FAA To
illegally charter to get a tax consultant. That just makes
(17:27):
your life easier. The last one is a financier. So
that's what my firm does. If you're paying cash, we're
not necessarily the equation. But if you're going to finance
your aircraft, you may call your bank and they may
do it for you. They may not. Some of the
larger banks don't necessarily want to do older aircraft or
smaller aircraft, and so then you're kind of left wondering
what am I going to do? How am I to
(17:48):
finance this? We basically run an RFP process for you
and make sure that we can kind of drive your
rate down, stretch out your amortization, drive your down payment down,
whatever your goals are. We work with family offs CFOs
to make sure that the proper leverage amount at the
right cost is put on the aircraft for whatever your
goals are.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Hey, you could save money with fractional ownership or with
jet memberships, but for some people the only way to
go is by owning their own private aircraft. I'm Barry
Ridults and you're listening to Bloomberg's at the Money
I wish the packet fla and to this cat, just
like the dragonfly.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
On the cheets, over the seats on the grease, to
anywhere up.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Please, have you ever wondered what it was like to
own your own private plane? It may not be as
out of reach as you imagine. Sure, some people spend
fifty million dollars or more, but there's a plane for
nearly every budget. Let's speak with Preston Holland. He's the
founder of Prestige Aircraft Finance. He also hosts a weekly
(00:50):
private aviation podcast called the VIPC and his author of
the newsletter Private Jet Insider, which provides advice and straties
to help clients navigate private aviation. All right, so let's
just keep it simple. Do I need to be a
billionaire to own my own plane?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Berry? You don't need to be a billionaire, and actually
most of my clients are not billionaires. In order to
own an aircraft, one that you're going to sit in
the back and you're going to have flown professionally for you. Typically,
what I'm seeing is a net worth is somewhere between
one hundred and two hundred million dollars as kind of
the starting point, and so not only is net worth
(01:31):
something to consider, but also what does this do for
my tax strategy and tax planning? How am I going
to use bonus appreciation to my benefit? There's a lot
of other things that come with this, and how much
cashload does my business spin off? But generally speaking, when
we're thinking about that, it's really in one hundred to
two hundred million dollar mark before you're starting to buy
(01:52):
something like a light jet or maybe a mid sized jet.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
There are a handful of watches you can buy in
a handful of very specific sports cars that sell for
more on the secondary market than MSRP. My assumption with
jets is that there's depreciation in the used market, not appreciation.
Is that a factor here or do most of these
(02:15):
jets go through the normal straight line depreciation process like
a boat? As the hours head up.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The answer is generally yes to that. Let me add
two caveats. One is coded and if you watch the
valuation of aircraft between twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen and twenty
twenty one, they appreciated significantly. So there's a lot of
people that were selling their airplanes in twenty twenty one
for what they bought or more than what they bought
(02:42):
in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen. So general market trends definitely
matters in this scenario. Generally speaking, over a lifetime, there
is a real depreciation factor. You sell for less than
what you bought it for, and the only nuance to
that is in a few make and models and in
a very short period of time post delivery. So right now,
(03:04):
if you look at the overall ecosystem, I can think of,
off the top of my head three models in which
that's happening, and they're driven by a few kind of
different forces. One is the Phenom three hundred. The Phenom
three hundred is an excellent light aircraft, and it is
loved by charter operators, it's loved by owners, and the
contract price that you bought it for two years ago
(03:25):
while you waited in line. Oftentimes you can take possession
of it and you flip it immediately and actually get
a premium above and beyond that market. Specifically, it's happening
a lot. The Prader five hundred and the Prayder six hundred,
which are also Number A product, are experiencing similar but
not quite as dramatic to that. The PC twelve market
has experienced that over the last couple of years. The
(03:47):
wait list for a lot of PC twelve is five years.
If you wanted to buy a brand new PC twelve
right now and you've got in line, you'd be waiting
for five years. And so for the first couple of
years you may be able to fly for a little
bit and then get out of it a little higher
than what you have.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I imagine the range of private aircraft is very different from
what I see in luxury automobiles. The sizes vary a lot,
how many people they can carry, how far they can fly,
how fast they can go, How broad are the ranges
of private planes, and how big is the price range
(04:24):
from small regional planes to cross atlantic type jets.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, Barry, let me start with the ratio of size
to range, because those two things actually play with each other.
You have light jets, which are usually really good for
regional travel. So this is for people who are flying
from Atlanta to Charleston, West Virginia, or the people flying
from New York to Chicago. Right, not terribly far as
(04:50):
the crow flies. Those light jets, you know, are not
necessarily going to do cross country type activities, but they're
going to be really good for that. When you're thinking
about how much am I going to spend? There's also
a very wide range. I would say, just to give
you a really broad range, your kind of get in
price for a jet, and this is you're talking pretty old,
(05:14):
pretty small, is going to be around a million to
two million dollars, and the top end of the market
is going to be what Jeff Bezos just took delivery of,
which is a G seven hundred at seventy five million
dollars sticker. And it's everything in between.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
What are the other costs and responsibilities beyond the purchase price?
What do people who purchase a plane what do they
need to think about and budget for.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
So the framework to think about this is the difference
between fixed costs and variable cost In the same way,
if you're going to draw the boat analogy, whether you
vote one day a year or three hundred and sixty
five days a year, there's a certain set of costs
that are constant and you're going to have to pay
them whether you use it a lot or you don't
use it. We refer to those as fixed costs, right,
(06:01):
So whenever you see somebody say what's the fixed costs
airplane that is typically CREWE expense, so that is your
pilot expense. That is your training expense, because your pilots
have to be trained in the aircraft. There's aircraft management,
which is you're paying a company, a third party company
to basically it's a property manager for your jet. That
is the best comparison. It's not a one for one comparison,
(06:23):
but it's pretty close. The hangar cost. So you're in
New York, I'm sorry to break it to you, but
hangar cost in your neck of the woods is very expensive.
But hangar costs you got to pay it whether you're
whether you're flying the airplane or not. Your insurance cost
that's going to be a percentage of full value, liability value,
things like that, and then there's some other miscellaneous fees.
There's subscriptions, there's naves, there's things like that. That fixed
(06:46):
cost will range in the kind of light jet world
four hundred to five hundred thousand dollars a year. And
then when you get up into the large aircraft, you
may have fixed costs north of a million dollars. If
you have to have multiple captains for your aircraft, fly
a lot things like that.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
What are the variable costs?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Like, So, when you talk about variable costs, you touched
on an important fact, which is the fuel. There is
jet a fuel which is much more expensive than what
you put into your car. And there are ways to
mitigate that. You can get fuel contracts to get you
a discount, but it kind of is what it is.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
You actually pay six seven dollars a gallon something like that.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Somewhere in there. Depends on what part of the country.
It can be as low as five and a half.
It can be as high as eight and a half.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Five and a half, I'll put it into my car.
So I mean, I'm okay with that. People don't realize
when you're flying a jet, even regionally, you're burning through
hundreds of gallons, if not thousands of gallons of fuel.
What is the hourly fuel cost for a mid sized jet?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, So I actually I have a tool that a
friend of mine build is called Obvia cost, and I
use that to do all my calculations. So the citation XLS,
which burns two hundred and twenty seven gallons per hour,
you give this CJ four which burns one hundred and
ninety eight gallons per hour. The Challenger three hundred, which
burns two hundred and eighty gallons per hour. Once you
(08:06):
start getting up into your large aircraft, let's say your
Global five thousand, which is an aircraft that can easily
do New York to London. They can do New York
to Paris, you're burning four hundred and ninety gallons of
fuel per hour. So it ranges significantly on how much
fuel you're burning. There's also in the fuel burn. It's
not a one to one you're not going to save
a lot of money. But if you're going faster and
(08:28):
burning more fuel, like there's a coefficient there. There's some
math to do. But for instance, right if we assume
six dollars and twenty five cents per hour, the Global
five thousand is burning three thousand dollars of fuel per hour.
Very where do we want to travel on our Global.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
New York to ls What New York to la.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
All right, So we're going to leave out of Teeterborough
Airport because we are not going to deal with the
port authority and we're going to go to John Wayne
which is SNA YEP because we're also not going to
deal with LAX. We're going to take four people with us.
We're going to fly the globe five thousand. It is
twenty one hundred miles nautical miles. It's going to take
us four hours and forty minutes approximately in the global
(09:09):
five thousand, and we are going to have seven thousand
dollars of variable costs per hour. Our total trip variable
cost is going to be thirty eight thousand, two hundred
and eighty one dollars to go from New York to.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
LA We're talking about fuel costs. We haven't talked about
maintenance costs. If you're flying one hundred hours a year
and you have a jet, what can you expect in
maintenance expenses assuming nothing goes wrong.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah, so a lot of times maintenance is actually calculated
on an hourly basis, So you're buying into a program.
There is not a direct correlation to this in the
real world. The closest it would be is to an
insurance product, but you're paying on a consumption basis. So
let's say I am signed up for a maintenance program.
(09:58):
A maintenance platform them is called JSSI Jets Services Solutions, Inc.
They have one hundred percent coverage for my engines. That's
going to amortize my overhaul costs, which can be a
couple of million bucks that has to happen every twenty
five hundred or five thousand hours. It's going to amortize
it on a per hour basis, so I pay per
hour I pay to the service, and then they pay
(10:20):
my chunky maintenance bills. Those engine programs very pretty significantly
depending on how much coverage. You can also put coverage
on the parts on the aircraft program called pro parts,
where you're paying an hourly cost. And then they're basically
they're taking the other side of the bet that you're
going to have less maintenance, and you're taking the front
(10:41):
side of the bet that says I'm going to have
a lot of maintenance and they're going to pay for it.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Or just that I want to have a fixed set
of costs and don't have to worry about the you know,
possible surprises, and willing to pay a little more upfront exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, you're willing to pay kind of stretched out over
time as opposed to large chucks. So instead of paying
your two million dollars over halls, you're going to pay
you know, let's say one thousand, two thousand dollars per
hour so generally speaking, if you were to amortize your
maintenance expense over your hourly, which is typically how everybody
calculates us on the Global five thousand that we're talking about,
(11:14):
it's going to be around forty one hundred dollars per hour.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Let's talk a few minutes about jets. If you want
to go across the Atlantic, what sized jet are we
talking about?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah, you're going to have to go into the large
cabin range. You're going to be looking at the gulf
Stream G four fifty to unlock kind of London. I
think it's going to be on the fringe for Paris.
The G five point fifty gets it with no problem,
the gulf Stream G six fifty, the Bombardier Global five thousand,
six thousand, sixty five hundred. There's a lot of numbers
and so that you're really gonna have to get into
(11:46):
that large cabin to comfortably get NonStop from New York
to Paris. And that's gonna, you know, possibly have a
flight attendant. It's going to have at least two pilots.
You're going to have at least one nice sized restroom,
maybe a small rest in the front. So that's really
getting up into your larger cabin aircraft. But that's really
how you're going to be able to get transpontent.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
I recall a few years ago there was a commercial
pilot shortage. I have a buddy who I grew up
with who flies Detroit to South Korea, and he was
telling me they just can't find enough pilots. Does that
same shortage of qualified pilots exist in private aviation as well?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Yeah, So the pilot situation in private and business aviation
has undergone some similar pressures to what it has in
commercial aviation. The price has gone up, the price of
pilots has gone up, the price of training has gone up,
just everything associated with the pilot has gone up. When
(12:45):
you look at kind of the shortage, you have to
remember that every pilot has to go through what's called
a type rating, and every pilot has to go through
what's called recurrent training. So, Barry, if you are qualified
to fly the Gulfstream G six fifty, you have gone
through the initial training, the initial type training, and you
keep that current because you have a client that is,
(13:06):
you know, kind of running through find that aircraft, and
then you have one of his buddies that calls and
says Barry, can you come find my Global five thousand.
You would have to go through the initial type training
and do the recurrent training. Right, every pilot can only
fly so many types of aircraft, and so as you
look at kind of the the quote unquote pilot shortage,
which there's a lot of debate in the industry whether
(13:27):
it even exists or not. If you look at that,
you have to look at type ratings. Now when you're
looking at buying an aircraft. One thing that I advise
clients to do a lot of times is follow the
big dogs. Okay, you've got the big dogs, which is
net Jets. They're the largest Flexjet, which is second largest
Vista Jet, which is pretty large, and then a lot
(13:47):
of the other operators if you follow their make models,
kind of their fleet composition, they train so many pilots.
I mean to put into a perspective for those that follow.
Publicly traded company Berkshire Hathaway owns NetJets and flight Safety.
They just reported an up quarter eight percent revenue growth.
(14:07):
NetJets owns its own training facility. That's how much. That's
how many slots that they were buying in the training facility.
So they will actually leak out pilots for people that
are like, you know what, I don't want to do
the seven days on, seven days off thing, So you know,
feed on three hundred pilots relatively easy to come by.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So someone's thinking about buying a private jet and they're
saying themselves, Gee, this sounds like a lot of responsibility
and a lot of cost, and maybe it's a little
out of their budget. How significant is fractional ownership to
the experience of owning your own jet?
Speaker 2 (14:42):
So fractional is similar, but it sometimes from time to
time will feel a bit more like chartering than owning
your own aircraft. Now, every fractional contract has a slightly
different language in their contracts of what's called all out hours. Barry,
I'm gonna come to me York, and you and I
are going to go for a sushi dinner in La
(15:03):
I know this great spot. We're going to go out there.
If we wanted to leave in two hours. We are
not guaranteed availability on a fractional if we want to
leave in twelve hours. So let's say we want to
leave tomorrow morning, guaranteed availability. And sometimes they will be
able to swing something through and actually get you there.
When you own an airplane, it is waiting for you
at the hangar, and you determine how close your pilots
(15:26):
have to be so that if you want to leave
in twenty minutes, you can do so right. And so
that is the biggest difference in the experience. The other
piece is the hassle that comes with hiring pilots and
managing stuff. I have a lot of billionaire clients and
billionaire friends that say, look, I don't want to mess
with this, I just want the easy button. Fractional is
(15:49):
the easy button. Like, at the end of the day,
you're paying somebody to deal with all the headache, and
you show up and you get on the airplane and
you go You're not having to say, ah, I've got
pilot turnover. It really is the easy button, which is
where that fills in the market. Not only can you
save kind of on your gross cost, but even if
(16:09):
you're flying where it makes sense to fly private, you're
you're negating a lot of that stress.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
So our last question. Someone reaches out to you and says, hey, Preston,
I'm thinking about buying my first plane. What sort of
advice do you give to that person.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Assemble a good transaction team. That is the number one
thing that you have to do. Your transaction team typically
looks like person number one is your broker. They're going
to be your quarterback. It's not dissimilar to buying a
commercial property. If they're going to find the aircraft, they're
going to manage the process. They're going to do all
your pre buy inspections, everything like that too. Your attorney
(16:45):
is probably pretty good in house. They know nothing about
FAA law, So you need to get an aviation specific
attorney the grand scheme of things. That's going to be
similar pricing to any other specialized attorney, but it's going
to make sure you're in how attorney is going to
pull their hair out trying to figure out how to
do this where the aviation attorney's going to be easy. Third,
(17:06):
aviation tax consultant of some sort. There's a few different
firms that specialize in aviation tax. Your CPA probably knows
how to run your books and make sure that everything's good.
They don't understand the concept of truth and leasing and
subleases and leasing between all of the known entities, and
how do you not get flagged by the FAA To
illegally charter to get a tax consultant. That just makes
(17:27):
your life easier. The last one is a financier. So
that's what my firm does. If you're paying cash, we're
not necessarily the equation. But if you're going to finance
your aircraft, you may call your bank and they may
do it for you. They may not. Some of the
larger banks don't necessarily want to do older aircraft or
smaller aircraft, and so then you're kind of left wondering
what am I going to do? How am I to
(17:48):
finance this? We basically run an RFP process for you
and make sure that we can kind of drive your
rate down, stretch out your amortization, drive your down payment down,
whatever your goals are. We work with family offs CFOs
to make sure that the proper leverage amount at the
right cost is put on the aircraft for whatever your
goals are.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Hey, you could save money with fractional ownership or with
jet memberships, but for some people the only way to
go is by owning their own private aircraft. I'm Barry
Ridults and you're listening to Bloomberg's at the Money
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