Aircraft Management
Our core values are:
Provide aircraft owners with the means to achieve maximum dispatch reliability and lower costs while enjoying all the added benefits of a dedicated full service flight department.
An aircraft is a significant investment. It is a tool for preserving your most valuable asset: TIME. It is our mission to ensure your aircraft is ready when you need it, so you can maximize the return on your investment. After all, you did not buy an airplane to worry about scheduling, RVSM compliance, Pilot training, passenger specific accounting, storage, scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, Insurance, or aircraft specific policies and procedures, but lack of due consideration for any of these issues will ground your aircraft or compromise safety.
Dollars and Sense
Managing an aircraft for several owners is complex. In our opinion, the true measure of how successful you are at it can be determined by the following litmus test:
“Do you and your partners feel that your financial contribution was justified by utilization?"
Problem #1: most owners with interest in a shared aircraft underutilize the equipment due to scheduling and airworthiness issues. It takes a higher degree of organization to manage a shared aircraft. We provide that organization.
Another symptom of a troubled partnership is an unfair division of costs. There were several accounting models in use for shared equipment in this industry, and none of them seemed to work very well on light aircraft. The two most commonly used are
- Divided expense method: Each owner bears his ownership interest as a percentage of whatever bills are due.
- Hourly contribution method: owners pay an hourly fee based on the total expected operating cost divided by the number of hours anticipated to be flown in that period.
Method #1 is unfair because utilization and ownership interest are not functions of one another.
Method #2 is just plain silly. We have found that people are less likely to utilize their equipment if there is some sort of self-imposed hourly fee associated with it. The resulting decrease in utilization will drive up the divided hourly cost, which further discourages utilization. This method is also the most uncomfortable if an owner wishes to sell his share—which makes the shares less marketable. |
