01:00:11 · Israel Slodowitz, Molly O'Shea
[01:00:11] S0: And because I'm very passionate about it. Oh. The easy one is deicing. So a lot of times, you know, when you fly charter, if the plane has to deice, sometimes you don't even realize, maybe it wasn't even snowing, but the plane got in the night before and snowed overnight. And then before you got to the airport, they they need to deice. Sometimes that could be more than twice the cost of the actual flight itself. Seriously? Yeah. We've seen it, like, $24,000 de ice bill in Aspen. So de icing is something that charter companies will typically pass along to the broker, which will pass along to you. And it could be a surprise because you a couple weeks later, you get the bill. Like, wait a minute. I I thought I paid for this flight. And if you read the contracts, specifically, it says they can pass along. When you, work with, fractionals, NetJets, Flexjet, right, typically, they'll bake it into the price. So they'll include it in the in the price, and they'll sort of absorb it across the system. And this way, nobody gets any any surprises. The second one and the one I'm much more passionate about is the is the event fees. So recently, we've seen private equity come into the private aviation space. They're buying these FPOs. They're called FPOs, the fixed based operator, where you park the planes. [01:01:17] S1: People just sling that term around all the time.
01:01:17 · Molly O'Shea, Israel Slodowitz
[01:01:17] S1: People just sling that term around all the time. [01:01:19] S0: Yeah. People assume that you know, but it's basically where the planes park overnight or people get on and off the airplanes. And what this private equity companies have kind of realized is that, you know, they can't really adjust the fuel price so much because everybody knows what the fuel price should be, right, based on, like, oil prices. But what they realize is that they have this monopoly on ramp space on the ground, and that their only way to really squeeze additional margin out of out of these businesses is to to sneak in these event fees. And they've really, in the last year or two, gotten very egregious. I mean, you'll see event fees for I saw an event fee for Harvard graduation. Like, That's not a special event. You don't need a special event fee for Harvard graduation. Of course, there's Super Bowl, there's all those. And sometimes those can get ridiculous. They could be in the 20s or 30s or $40,000 just for a short slot to drop off or pick up. Again, another area where going fractional really helps because these companies, they'll pre commit 500,000 square foot of ramp space knowing the masters are going to have hundreds of arrivals. So it still costs you something, but it's significantly less. But event fees is something that really caught everybody by surprise. And I think there needs to be some correction where these businesses are significantly taking advantage of of of their industry.
01:01:19 · Israel Slodowitz, Molly O'Shea
[01:01:19] S0: Yeah. People assume that you know, but it's basically where the planes park overnight or people get on and off the airplanes. And what this private equity companies have kind of realized is that, you know, they can't really adjust the fuel price so much because everybody knows what the fuel price should be, right, based on, like, oil prices. But what they realize is that they have this monopoly on ramp space on the ground, and that their only way to really squeeze additional margin out of out of these businesses is to to sneak in these event fees. And they've really, in the last year or two, gotten very egregious. I mean, you'll see event fees for I saw an event fee for Harvard graduation. Like, That's not a special event. You don't need a special event fee for Harvard graduation. Of course, there's Super Bowl, there's all those. And sometimes those can get ridiculous. They could be in the 20s or 30s or $40,000 just for a short slot to drop off or pick up. Again, another area where going fractional really helps because these companies, they'll pre commit 500,000 square foot of ramp space knowing the masters are going to have hundreds of arrivals. So it still costs you something, but it's significantly less. But event fees is something that really caught everybody by surprise. And I think there needs to be some correction where these businesses are significantly taking advantage of of of their industry. [01:02:39] S1: What's the craziest thing that you've seen? In terms of, like, event fees? Or Anything.
01:02:39 · Molly O'Shea, Israel Slodowitz
[01:02:39] S1: What's the craziest thing that you've seen? In terms of, like, event fees? Or Anything. [01:02:44] S0: Oh, had Kanye West fly with us and take a picture of my copilot shoes. What? Walk into the cockpit and say, can I take a picture of your shoes? [01:02:52] S1: Is that how they modeled off the Yeezy's? [01:02:55] S0: I guess so. Really? I think he was wearing his, like, big his, like, his big boots or whatever. Yeah. So, I mean, there's, like you know, we we we see some some some pretty crazy stuff. But I think for the most part, like, we find a lot of very normal people, like people who just, like, live their life. They they look at this as a way to get more done. And, you know, typically, like, really solid people, solid experiences, nothing too crazy. [01:03:25] S1: What kind of safety protocol do you have to keep up with? And especially when people are looking at these planes or these different services, I think it's like net jets that's never had a death. I mean, that's how they run, like, their marketing. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, what should people be asking or or or kind of be comforted by on safety standards?
01:03:47 · Israel Slodowitz
[01:03:47] S0: And I think I think Warren Buffett said, like, you should spend every penny you can on safety and then more. So I think the large providers understand the importance of safety, and they run very, very safe operations. They understand how much more scrutiny private aviation gets over commercial aviation. So safety is something that is ingrained in the DNA. When you're chartering a plane, it's a little bit more difficult to to discern what the safety standard of the plane that you're flying. Like, don't really know. If you looked at all the hours flown in 2025, 35% were flown at the top five providers. And then all the rest was done with all the rest of the hours flown were like small charter operators. They have five, ten airplanes, maybe sometimes even three airplanes. So it's a very long tail of operators out there. And when you're looking for a flight, you really don't know what you're getting. So having a broker is very important. Having a broker, a charter broker, not a sale broker, charter broker who knows the industry, who's visited these operators, they've gone to these, like, in the hangars and met the met the staff, the safety people. I think it's very important having a broker you can trust to help guide you. There is some, like, online data you can look up. Like, the FAA has has some guidance about you can see, like, if the aircraft is on a one thirty five certificate, if it's, like, legal and charter charter legal. I think I saw Chamath Paliapatia posted that he only flies on a plane with Argus Platinum. So I'll talk a little bit about Argus. Argus is like a third party safety rating that comes in and does an audit. It's really like a pay for play, You basically pay them money, and then they give you a certification, especially at their gold rating. Their platinum rating is a little bit more in-depth. They come to your office. They do an audit. And I think that certainly, it's better than nothing. But I do think we need more, I think we I do think we need a better system. I'll I'll I'll I'll say I think we need a better system for helping unknown travelers, like, from figuring out which aircraft are safer versus which aircraft are not. And I and I think that's that's a big gap right now in our industry.
01:05:59 · Molly O'Shea, Israel Slodowitz
[01:05:59] S1: Do you have any particular flight rules around safety? Like, times you can fly in certain areas or, like, sketchy I don't know. Like, Aspen, that airport is sketchy as hell. [01:06:09] S0: Oh, yeah. [01:06:10] S1: I don't like flying there. It's freaky. Do you have any rules around locations like that? Or or I don't what's that one island in, Saint Bart's? Like [01:06:18] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So say don't think any anybody really flies Saint Bart except for, the small little pro propeller airplanes. There's Saint Martin, which is which is nearby. Aspen's a very tricky airport. And of course, it's a very popular airport. People like to fly people like to fly to. So I think our fifth busiest airport is Aspen. Really? Yeah. Maybe sixth actually behind the white planes. So people people fly into Aspen a lot. Aspen has its own unique tricky, set of constraints. We don't fly into Aspen at night. We won't do it. Okay. Yeah. We're we're, like, not even allowed to, like, even if you want to. You shouldn't be flying into Aspen at night. There's no there's no good reason to do that. Telluride is another airport that we have some restrictions around. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of them out there, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Sun Valley. So there's certain airports that we have an extra set of standards, that our pilots operate by. We our pilots, use something called a GOM, a general operations manual Okay. Which is, like, basically where they have the rules of what they can and can't do within our company. And we have very strict rules about certain airports.