Boutique charter firms can provide quicker responses for both geopolitical trends and customer interaction, a panel of smaller for-hire business aircraft operators told attendees at the Air Charter Association’s annual Air Charter Expo (ACE) on Tuesday at London Biggin Hill Airport. They also emphasized the need for a considered approach to growth, including introducing additional aircraft or fleet types that panelists said can often complicate a smaller charter provider’s operations.
“Big isn’t always better,” suggested Vince Essex, CEO of Birmingham-based Above Aero. The company launched fixed-price city-pair air charter operations last month with an Embraer Phenom 100 in what he calls a “modern achiever market.” While Above has already identified a second Phenom to adopt into its very light jet operation, Essex believes that “the main thing for us is that we grow stronger, not that we grow bigger.”
Vladimir Bogaychuk, aircraft charter specialist at the Czech Republic’s CTR Atmospherica Aviation, agreed that this type specialization is benefitial for smaller operators. The company operates an owned fleet of eight Embraer Phenom 300Es and Praetor 600s.
It is a similar situation for Luminair: the Hamburg-based operator recently signed for nine Cessna Citation Latitudes, representing the fourth type to join its existing 13-aircraft fleet. “It’s clear we do not want to get any more aircraft types on [our air operator certificate] anytime soon, because commonality is actually what makes it scalable,” he said. The first Latitude is on track to be delivered this year, with the remaining eight to follow next year.
The question of type aside, Bogaychuk argued that “the question is not if we have to scale, but if the scale makes economic sense.” Essex cited a “myth around utilization” and cautioned that hours flown do not always equate to profitability. He suggested instead that a smaller operator’s focus should be “how we are perceived and how we mitigate single point of failures along the way.”
For CTR Atmospherica, this so-called “virtual scale” can be created through strategic agreements with trusted operators. “When you are perceived as a reliable partner, then size becomes irrelevant,” Bogaychuk cautioned, adding that although “an operator may be small, that shouldn’t be an excuse to be inefficient.”
Regardless of scale of operation—with Essex reflecting that regulatory routes to achieving an AOC are identical “regardless of if we’ve got one aircraft or a fleet of 15 Citations”—smaller operators are still subject to the same oversight. Trotter believes that “as a small operator, there’s almost more oversight from the authority on us: there’s more regular audits…and in a way, that challenges us to further improve our safety and procedures.”
However, according to Bogaychuk, “Although in general, the regulator understands proportionality between smaller and bigger operators, [the administrative burden] could still be more proportionate to the size of the company.”
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