Learn to Fly Private

Welcome to the 6th edition of this newsletter. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family. If you traveled, were you thinking to yourself how much better it would be to fly private? That's likely one of the reasons you're here.

A piece of jet maintenance:

I've had some incredible conversations with subscribers to the newsletter and in my direct messages on X. The topics are very diverse! I've created a form to help better guide the direction of the newsletter. If you have 2 minutes to fill out these 4 questions, that would help me greatly! You can find the form here.

If you're new, first of all welcome! Second, you can see the past 5 issues of this newsletter here in case you missed any.

---

---

Here's what we'll cover this week:

• The evasive "Empty Leg Charter Deal" and how to (maybe) find them
• Partnership in a jet: the pros and cons

As always, I love your feedback and I want to make this stuff useful. Reply to this email or DM me on X at @prestonholland6. Now let's dive in...

Empty Leg Charters and How To Find Them

Finding an empty leg charter is bit like finding Bigfoot. There are many that claim they have found them, yet you probably have never seen one in real life. Fortunately for you, empty leg charters actually do exist and Bigfoot likely does not.

What is an empty leg charter?

An empty leg charter is the "dead head" leg of an aircraft repositioning. Let's say an exec from GM or Ford has called a charter trip from Orlando Executive to get back to Detroit from a large trade show. The plane that he called is currently located in Trenton, New Jersey. The plane has to get from Trenton to Orlando regardless of whether there is someone on the plane or not. This is often referred to as a "repositioning flight."

Side note: do you remember the outrage of Kylie Jenner's plane moving 40 miles between airports? That was a repositioning flight, because she was getting ready to leave from the other airport and the plane had to be where she was going to be.

When these repositioning flights take place, especially over long distances, operators will attempt to maximize revenue by selling the time on that route to another paying customer. If not, its a sunk cost and usually is paid by the user who called the jet (in this case, its the executive in Orlando.)

What's the Catch?

There are a few inconveniences to getting a discounted empty leg flight. Here's the top 4:

1. They have to be going from where you are to where you're going. This rarely happens exactly at your home airport to your destination, so you will likely have to drive a bit on one end of the trip.
2. You have to be ready to move quickly. These usually don't hit the market until (max) 5 days before departure. Need to be ready to jump on it, as they're last minute deals.
3. You'll have to find your own way home. If you do get a round trip empty leg flight, I want to hear about it. This would be like finding Bigfoot and his wife. If not, you'll have to fly an airline back or charter at full price on the way back.
4. Not all empty legs are actual deals. A dirty secret is charter brokers will market a flight as an "empty leg" but its actually just a full priced charter that they may take a slightly less commission on.

How do you find empty legs?

If you've been following along thus far, this won't be a shock to you but aviation is incredibly unsophisticated when it comes to some of these optimizations. Many charter brokers or operators attempt to sell empty legs via email blasts or on social media. This makes for a really inefficient way to find them. There are a few apps that have tackled this to a certain extent, and I'll list them below, but be warned that you need to be very confident on the actual pricing on jet charters so that you don't accidentally get ripped off.

• ​JetASAP: a full on-demand charter app that has an empty leg function. Pay per flight.
• ​Wheels Up: Wheels Up has an empty leg feature for their connect members. $2,995 per year and then pay per flight. As I'm writing, there's a Jacksonville, FL to Raleigh, NC on a Super-Mid for $536.92 + taxes/fees.
• ​Vaunt: For $1,000 per year, you can enter an algorithmic driven waitlist app. Usually on Volato's Hondajet fleet (Full disclosure, this is my referral code. If 5 people buy it, I get a year for free. I am always transparent with you on what's in it for me.)
• ​Vista XO: Here's the good ole fashioned email for empty legs. You could probably make a killing with an email scraper and take all of these email services and make a single source app. If you want to build this, let me know.

Conclusion

If you're looking for a deal on private aviation, this is probably as close as you're going to get. Private aviation isn't cheap, but it unlocks the entire country or the world to you. Empty legs fall somewhere in between on demand and flying commercial, because you fly on the operators terms and to their destination.

Jet Partnerships and When It Makes Sense

2 weeks ago, we talked about how to spend less than $3m on private aviation. In this, I pointed out that you could split a 1997 Falcon 900EX with 3 other friends and get you below your budget. I want to do a deeper dive on this idea because it is a very viable option for ownership, especially with the right match. Let's dive in for who this works for. For the purposes of this deep dive, I'm going to use a 2 party structure, but this could work for 4-5 partners depending on utilization needs. You'll want to calculate your yearly division on a basis of 300-400 hours, which is the max per year you'll want to put on a jet.

When you should consider partnership

If you could define the perfect partnership, it would be between a business user and a personal user. One person in the partnership would use the jet primarily for business purposes and have a more on-demand need and the other would use it primarily for personal use with more flexible plans. This is in some ways nirvana, but possible. The following chart is from my friends at Partners in Aviation. They have a managed program for partnerships and are a great resource. We had a 20 minute interview with founder, Mark Malloy a few years ago (the day before my daughter was born, actually) that you can see the whole thing here.

This is a great demonstration of who co-ownership works best for. If you're flying 50-150 hours per year, the fixed costs of whole ownership is often prohibitive. These fixed costs include hangar, insurance, jet management fees, pilots, software, major maintenance events, etc. If you can share those fixed costs proportionately between two people, it becomes much more palatable with very similar access.

Splitting Equitably

The hourly cost is what it is, and you will want to make sure all maintenance reserves (engine reserves, APU reserves, and others) are paid on a per-hour basis. This will ensure that if one partner utilizes the aircraft more, they are paying their portion of the known maintenance ahead. This is the consumption-based part of the partnership.

On fixed costs, the easiest way is to split all the fixed costs down the middle because both want full access to the jet. You may decide to split them proportionate to ownership (75%/25% for instance) and then allocate day access proportionately as well. This means the person who owns the 75% will get 273.75 days of the year and the 25% will get 91.25 days of access. You'll want to set expectations at the beginning, and come up with an equitable partnership.

On acquisition cost, this is also great because you don't have to pay for the entire plane. If you want to split 50/50, it would be easiest but you can divide however you want to. If you want to finance the aircraft, you'll have to both (or all) finance it. The bank doesn't want to lend 80% of 50% of the plane, they won't have repo rights on the whole aircraft. You can split the monthly debt service evenly.

Using a Management Company

I highly suggest that you use a jet management company when entering in a partnership. You can dig deeper on choosing the right jet management company in this article. The jet management company will manage scheduling and ensure that maintenance happens at optimized times. You likely don't want to run a flight department and all of the nuances that go into that, so choosing the right partner to manage your jet in this two way partnership is important.

​

​

Until next week,

Preston Holland

p.s. it's an absolute pleasure to write this every week. If you haven't already, help me out by filling out this form so I can learn a bit more about you and can help shape the future of this newsletter.