Login

Lost your password?
Don't have an account? Sign Up

The Economics of Private Jets

Contact us to Add Your Business

Watch over 2,400 documentaries for free for 31-days by signing up at and using the code, “Wendover”

Listen to Extremities at

Subscribe to Half as Interesting (The other channel from Wendover Productions):

Get the Wendover Productions t-shirt:

Support Wendover Productions on Patreon:

Youtube:
Instagram:
Twitter:
Sponsorship Enquiries: wendover@standard.tv
Other emails: sam@wendover.productions
Reddit:

Animation by Josh Sherrington
Sound by Graham Haerther ( )
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster

Special thanks to Patreon supporters Adam Chelminski, Arkadiy Kulev, Charles Zilinski, Chris Allen, Connor J Smith, Daddy Donald, Etienne Dechamps, Eyal Matsliah, Hank Green, John & Becki Johnston, Kyle, MyNameIsKir, Plinio Correa, Qui Le, Remi_Scarlet, Tom Dooner, Tyler Hamm, and Vaughn Mudrick

Music by
Select footage courtesy the AP Archive

References:
[1] ; ; ;
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7] ; ;
[8]
[9]
[10] ; ;
[11]
[12] ;
[13]
[14]

Click Here to Add Your Business

https://www.privatejetcharters.in

97 comments

  1. Wendover Productions

    If you missed all the different announcements, I started a new podcast called Extremities about a month ago. It’s all about how and why the world’s most isolated human settlements exist, with the first season being on Pitcairn–the 50 person British territory in the South Pacific.
    You can listen to the podcast here: http://ExtremitiesPodcast.com

    1. Justin Newcomb

      I worked at a municipal airport and I became good friends with a local car dealership tycoon who had his own private jet he flew himself. Just because I was nice enough to him he literally drove up to me during the middle of my shift while I was removing vines from the fence line. Needless to say within an hour I was in the cockpit of a Cessna Citation Mustang at 10,000 ft.

      Moral of the story is… Network, work hard, and SHOW INTEREST!!! If you want to be a Pilot or have a chance to enjoy the elitist comforts of a private jet, be humble, friendly, and aim for your future many of the pilots and patron CEO’s who who fly those jets were eager wannabes when they were younger and they know the driven young bucks of today are tomorrows CEO’s and Entrepreneurs. They want you to be as successful as they are and always remember that.

    1. Dave Crupel

      @Truth You can buy a jetski
      But if you never have the time to use it, or you cant bother because you’re “on call” and have to be ready to go to work any time 24/7, then you’re not happy.

    1. Sebastian Peitsch

      jane lam all you’re telling me here is that there are too many cars on the road so the buses can’t keep to their schedule. So the answer is to get busses of the streets. Which isn‘t what the Hyperloop does.

    2. jane lam

      @Sebastian Peitsch You are severely mistaken to think that buses keep to their printed schedules, there are traffic jams, terminus/depot breaks, breakdowns etc. Try waiting for over an hour for an empty bus and watching some full to capacity buses drive past you. Not all buses can take you from A to B in one fell swoop and you could find yourself having to take multiple buses to reach one destination, add to that the waiting time required for both the journey out and back. You can save money or time.

  2. Daniel Madley

    I’m surprised the video did not touch on the value of the work that could be done while flying private. Much easier to write/review reports, prepare presentations and have team meetings while flying private than at airports or on planes with the public listening in. Obviously not easy to calculate but worth a mention all the same.

    1. ClarinoI

      @Sauga Verse Private aeroplane doesn’t necessarily mean private jet. Go on Flightradar24 and click on a smaller icon or two and you’ll quickly discover most are flying above 40,000ft.

    2. nai727

      Sauga Verse that would explain it! Piper does not make a jet. They only make propellor aircraft, most piston powered aircraft have low service ceilings, meaning that they cannot fly above most of the weather.

    1. Nikhil Bansal

      dannydaw59 they do, when flying international, you must fly to an airport with a customs office. The custom officers then come on the plane and do a thorough check, they do a good job.

  3. gotham61

    Many big corporations have a policy of not allowing multiple upper management people on the same flight, to reduce the hit in case of an accident. A friend in upper management at Snap-On Tools says it’s the policy there. A 1993 corporate jet crash took out the president and upper management of In N Out Burger, and almost sunk the company.

    1. Heath Mitchell

      @Bill A “In before” (as in “I was here/I thought this would happen before this happened if it does happen” usually but that doesn’t make sense here because it’s in the past, maybe before we find out that it happened)

    2. Owen Lang

      There is a company near me called united engines, about 10 yrs ago all day the execs were on their bombardier global 7500, and on takeoff they hit some pelicans and killed the execs and president,

    3. Joseph Ho

      @Ryan Remmers most automotive accidents are much more common but typically survivable, aviation accidents are the opposite. In a typical travel itinerary, there is also much more time spent in the air and a relatively short road trip at the destination so the exposure is different. Risk management considers probably and consequence together.

    1. S V

      Plus when he visited towns where one of his stores was being built, he’d fly over head to see how construction was going. Then land, and he’d visit said site, and shoot the breeze with us workers.

    1. Jonas D. Atlas

      @Aiden Henrie It might not be particularly friendly to the environment, but at that point, it definitely makes sense for the company. They probably don’t even care about that part, and it hardly factors into whether or not it “makes sense”.

  4. Evan Boyar

    I think you may have done the economic evaluation backwards. From the perspective of a company, the company would evaluate whether or not it’s worth it to fly a jet by looking at how much net value an individual adds to the company. That would be the gross value added LESS the person’s salary/benefits/etc. Your analysis only makes sense for an individual with a salary paying their own way without a company paying for them.

    1. Bernard Baltazar

      Your model is closer to reality but the question is how do you compute for “the net value an individual adds to the company”? The value of a company is in itself speculative in nature. Remember, valuation is more of an art than science. Especially if the company is private, there’s no market cap to rely on. The salary model eliminates the speculative aspect of valuation because it’s an actual cost, thus, imo it’s superior for documentary purposes. Companies would also prefer the salary model because its cost-to-cost, without speculative valuation w/c makes decision making more objective.

    2. D283JDSK

      No Wendovers system makes sense. If you work out that in 3 hours someone earns 15,000 dollars. A private jet says let’s saves 3 hours but costs 20,000 dollars. So technically it is not worth it.

  5. Woeful Zeus

    I used to work at a small airport where we had Golf Stream jets and other high end private jets stationed. The people that owned them wouldn’t always use them or exclusively use them. When they knew they weren’t going to need the jet they would allow the jets to be “chartered” where other rich people that needed a high end jet could use it and it’s crew for a premium cost. Small airports are often closer to their final destination and offer a much quicker commute. Also small airports know the occupants and security can be easily expedited saving the patrons literally hours of time compared to a commercial 1st class plane ticket. Depending on the person, their skills or value to the business flying them, these few hours could save the business millions of dollars.
    Often it wasn’t just CEOs or top business persons flying on these jets but engineers, or key personal that absolutely needed to be moved to another site in the quickest possible manner.

    Think about it, you own a major business and you have multiple sites across the world. you have a major issue in 1 site and your top engineer is located halfway across the world. Every minute that the major issue persists it costs your company 10s of thousands of dollars, maybe even a major impact to the environment as well. So you call your pilot and tell him you need the jet ready ASAP and you send your engineer to the local small airport. 30 minutes later the jet and engineer / support personal are on their way to fix the problem.
    If you attempted to send him through normal commercial airlines it would take him 2 hours minimum to get through security, time waiting for the flight schedule, and the added time of having to travel to and from a hub city airport big enough to have commercial airlines. an incident that could have been fixed in a few hours through private jets now takes over a day to repair. Also your top engineer is stressed out from dealing with all the crap with commercial airlines, bags / tools possibly getting misplaced and he’s not at his prime when arriving to troubleshoot a major issue. Private jets are often comfortable, and somewhat relaxing for this reason. Not only that most of these jets are built to facilitate work that can be done in SITU.
    If I was a big business COO, CEO or CFO you better believe I wouldn’t hesitate to own or have charter aircraft on standby at all times.

    These jets at first glance appear to “be a major impact on the environment” but I have personally seen a dozen times where these jets have saved the environment from major catastrophic events because they were at the right place at the right time and got the right people on site to fix the problem before it got out of hand.

    1. Sauga Verse

      A long comment, but accurate.
      I was an engineer for one company and a team of would fly to work on a weekly basis.
      At the airport, there was no security at all. Getting onto our jet was no different from getting onto a bus, or a taxi.
      For the record, if my company needed me to go to a certain place, and it was only me, then I would fly the regular larger commercial jets.

    1. Paul K

      @Bernard S Chicago and most leftist controlled cities/states have massive taxes and regulations. Moving there would cost billions per year. Plus the culture is different. Walmart doesn’t want that culture and values.

    2. Imperial0666

      @Bernard S why would they go to Chicago? if they left Arkansas for a major city it would probably be Dallas where Alice Walton lives. They stay in Arkansas because they pretty much own the state government. In Dallas they would just be one corporation amongst a bunch of other corporate HQs. and that whole Bentonville Fayetteville area has developed into its own small metro area in the last 20 years. Not everything needs to be concentrated into these big cities.

  6. cloudraker100

    I’ve flow both private business (as a guest) and regular air. Having all those layovers and missed connections sure makes me pine for the private jet again. But the private jet costs 60 million…

    1. Stu Bur

      A small jet can be an order of magnitude less costly. A Honda HA-420 Hondajet for example costs about $5.3 million and is relatively fuel efficient. An Embraer EMB-500 Phenom 100EV costs about $4.5 million. Many of these small jets also only require a single pilot instead of two on many of the larger jets.

  7. Digital Evidence Expert

    There is a flaw in this analysis. This video attempts to justify the cost of a private jet vs the salary that an executive earns and how many hours is saved vs the hourly cost of the executive. The truth in companies is the value of an executive is how much he can increase the income of the company per hour he works and not what the salary is. An executive is typically worth 10 times or higher than the salary he is paid. This means that saving the executive time with a private jet allows that executive to do other things to greatly increase the income of the company well beyond the cost of the jet or the salary he is paid. The analysis in this video equates the executive’s time value to his salary assumes that the company is only breaking even (the money the company pays the executive = the value of the executive’s time to the company) and this analysis grossly undervalues the contribution of executives.

    1. Isaac Flett

      I actually think it does make some sense to value the executives time by their salary. At least as a rough estimate. While they may make their company much more than their salary is worth it’s probably true that they only make their company slightly more than what another similarly skilled person could make. So rather than lose an amount of money equal to what they make for the company, they would really lose the difference between what this and another person could make plus the salary of that person. In practice, I think this should come to something slightly above the executive’s salary but far below what they make for the company. I realize that it’s not realistic to hire someone hourly who can do the executives job just while they are on the plane, but it might make sense in a very large company to hire another executive.
      Another point thats kind of implied here is that working an extra hour doesn’t earn the company an amount proportional to the total the executive makes. Working twice as hard an executive making 10 million for his company might bring in only 11 million in profits, and working half as hard might bring in 9. If this isn’t true then the company could have some serious expanding to do.
      (these are just my thoughts im sure there is extensive research out there about how to value an executives time)

    2. Sauga Verse

      Actually, your comments and analysis is dead on accurate.
      The value of just having a company employee at a certain location outweighs the cost of getting him/her there.
      Keep in mind that some companies could potentially lose money of they don’t send an employee to certain locations where they either have to trouble shoot a problem, or even take over a situation.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*
*