Private aviation has changed dramatically over the past decade, ushering in more jetsetters than ever. According to Knight Frank's 2026 edition of The Wealth Report, a record 47% of first-time private jet flyers in Q1 2026 were under age 45, reinforcing a growing trend in the industry.
What does this mean for high-net-worth individuals and families? Maybe you need to reassess how you fly private. Are you paying a handsome membership fee or deposit before arranging your first flight? Maybe you need to evaluate whether flying private makes sense for you. Do you fly 150+ hours a year with your family or business?
Flying private is more accessible than ever, and the same institutions that have ruled the scene may no longer be the best option—fiscally or experientially.
FlyJBL Founder & CEO Bobby Harris joins Paul Ayotte, Founding Partner and Client Advisor at Fidelis Capital, to explain the private aviation memberships landscape, how the high-net-worth are flying private today, and what you should consider before making a decision.
Transcript
Paul Ayotte: My name is Paul Ayotte. I'm one of the co-founding members of Fidelis Capital, and I also work as a client advisor inside of our firm. Today we've got an interesting but yet fun topic around private aviation, and our guest speaker today is Bobby Harris, who is the CEO of FlyJBL. Welcome, Bobby, and thank you for joining us today.Bobby Harris: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here and chat with you guys about private aviation.
Paul Ayotte: Yeah. A lot has changed over the last decade. I've got a lot of clients and a lot of prospects that's asked us a lot of questions about being able to access private aviation, but what has really driven over the last decade or so to make it a lot more accessible for individuals and families?
Bobby Harris: The only way you could really fly is either you owned an airplane or if you had a friend with an airplane or you purchased a piece of an airplane, and that was it for the longest time for most people. But now there's many different options. There's still owning, obviously. There's fractionals.
Bobby Harris: There's what's called a jet card. There are memberships, and then just the ad hoc chartering. You can call someone and get a charter flight. What has really changed over the years, honestly, are there's more and more people that have the money to be able to access these different options. That, and technology's changed to make it easier to find the operators that have the planes, and so many different things have changed.
Bobby Harris: So what really makes it accessible are there are more options now to find airplanes that suit your needs and your mission that you have that particular day you need a flight.
Paul Ayotte: Yeah. Interesting. And what I've heard of, and a lot of our clients own their own jets or do fractional jet ownership, there's a lot more programs available today, but one of the big things is pricing, right?
Paul Ayotte: Can you break down a little bit of the pricing from owning your own jet all the way down to a fractional ownership?
Bobby Harris: Absolutely, and good point you just made there. People own their own jets still. They have the fractionals still. So let's break it all down. Owning a jet. When you own a jet you have to, depending on the size of the jet, obviously, it's between $5 million and $50 million plus.
Bobby Harris: Okay? That's great if you fly a certain amount of hours. So primarily 300 hours or above you should feel comfortable purchasing a jet, not a problem. But with the $5 million to $50 million, you still have your yearly expenses, which are the management of the plane, the pilots, insurance, maintenance and all that.
Bobby Harris: So it's kind of pricey for a majority of the people who aren't flying that many hours. Now, below that you have fractional. You purchase a piece of a plane. There are few of the big operators that handle that, and again, even with the fractional, you should be able to be flying around 200, 250 plus. That kind is the wheelhouse where it makes sense.
Bobby Harris: Anything below that, you shouldn't own or have fractional. And below that you have the jet cards, which really just you're prepaying for a charter. That's all you're really doing. You're giving someone $250,000, $500,000, and you're prepaying this for something that they say costs X per hour, but more than likely it's going to cost you more per hour.
Bobby Harris: And that's part of their economics. That's part of the system, and that's one issue for me personally, the system has been the way it has been for decades pretty much, and they can charge whatever they want to charge. So now it's different. Let's go down to chartering. Ad hoc chartering is great.
Bobby Harris: The brokers will go out and find a plane for you and say, "Paul, plane's X dollar." Great. You pay him the money. You have no idea what the actual cost of the plane is. So the plane could run from New York to Miami. You're paying the retail rate. The broker said, "Oh, I have an empty leg flying from New York to Miami.
Bobby Harris: It costs $20,000. You know what? I will tell Paul it's $50,000," because that's the going rate for a retail rate, so you don't know. So there's different options, and those are the big three.
Paul Ayotte: So Bobby, what I'm hearing from you is that people who fly less than 125 hours a year might be overpaying and definitely being under-serviced.
Paul Ayotte: Can you break that down a little bit for our listeners?
Bobby Harris: Sure. Absolutely. And I'll preface that with, in the past there weren't this many options.
Paul Ayotte: Mm-hmm.
Bobby Harris: And most people didn't know. They heard at the country club, "Call X company. They'll take care of you." It's different now. So let's start off at the beginning.
Bobby Harris: Let's start with the fractional. To get into a fractional, it's between $500,000 for a light jet up to $5 million upfront before you fly one minute. The problem with that is you're not really quite sure how many hours you're going to fly that year. You're not sure, and so you're overpaying automatically by a lot.
Paul Ayotte: That's programs like NetJets, correct?
Bobby Harris: Absolutely, like NetJets, FlexJets. Okay. And they're great for corporations that are flying 500, 700 hours a year. They may fly from different airports a lot and they have an office in LA, office in New York, and they can fly out of both easily. That's great for them.
Bobby Harris: But for the majority of the ultra-high-net-worth individuals, families, they really don't need that big of an investment on something they won't use more than likely half of what they should use it for. That's called breakage. So let's say, for example, you spend $1 million on a plane, you pay your monthly maintenance fee and everything else, and your set hours are 85 hours a year.
Bobby Harris: They're saying you pay $8,000 for those hours. Okay, great. If you don't reach that level, and more than likely you're not going to reach that level just because of life—you're still paying all the fees. So you may pay the $1 million, which includes 85 hours, and you only use 65 hours. That means your hourly rate went up from $8,000 to $12,000, which is actually more expensive than chartering without the $1 million investment.
Paul Ayotte: Yeah.
Bobby Harris: That $1 million can come back and stay with your firm, and you can help them grow it instead of them spending it, which I think is the most important thing, because at the end of the day, private aviation should not be a huge capital investment for someone flying under 150, 125, below that.
Bobby Harris: It should not be. They should just be able to pay what the market bears, what someone like I can negotiate for them, and go with that.
Paul Ayotte: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense, Bobby. And, you know, just to hone in even a little bit more, I know you're the CEO of FlyJBL. Talk a little bit about why your model is different and why it costs less than some of the fractional ownerships, and it's more efficient for the families that fly less than 125 hours to utilize.
Bobby Harris: A broker wants to make money for their brokerage, okay? A normal charter broker. So the flight may be X, and they charge you Y. At the end of the day, how big is that spread? Is it a normal $1,000, $5,000, or is it $25,000, $30,000? Easily it could be that sometimes. So what we do, I'll bring transparency and as well as a better pricing because we're a charter operator.
Bobby Harris: So what that means basically is I fly people around the country on charters, so I have a higher power of working with these operators for the better pricing. Whether it's someone calling saying, "Hey, Paul wants to fly from Tampa to New York. Here's your price." "Oh, let's call Bobby. He flies from Tampa to New York all the time, so his operator will give him a better deal."
Bobby Harris: Okay, that's my normal thing. "Oh, I have no jet." "No problem, Bobby, here's your price." Because the operator wants to keep me, because I'm flying basically more than a corporation does, because I'm flying different people all the time.
Paul Ayotte: That makes total sense. And let's talk about what I feel is probably even the most important factor of all this, and that's of safety.
Paul Ayotte: We're flying around friends and family and ourselves. Can you talk a little bit about this industry in general and how FlyJBL takes a little bit extra step there when it comes to safety issues in flying in a plane?
Bobby Harris: Our director of operations and aviation, John Leary, is a pilot with 12,000-plus hours.
Bobby Harris: He handles every one of our flights. So he makes sure the pilots are well-trained, have the proper hours that our firm believes in, and that the planes are well-kept, the engines are well below maintenance levels. So they're not due next week, they're well below that. So we make sure all our flights are the way he wants to fly them himself.
Bobby Harris: And so it's not worth it to us having you fly in a plane that we don't believe is safe for all of us. So that's the most important thing with us, honestly.
Paul Ayotte: I appreciate that because that is a huge factor that I know a lot of our families and relationships weigh in on when they do fly private. And just kind of start to wrap things up here a little bit, Bobby, you and I were talking before the podcast, and you had mentioned how you got into the business.
Paul Ayotte: And I think it's such a neat story on how you formed FlyJBL. Could you share with our listeners that story?
Bobby Harris: FlyJBL started from my first aviation venture, which is Pooch Airways, which is basically a private airlines to get the owners and the dogs to Portugal, London, or the Caribbean. And then we grew from that into what we see now as FlyJBL, which is flying executives, CEOs, and founders.
Bobby Harris: And now with a private client group, we want to specifically target people of ultra-high-net worth and let them understand how this aviation industry works, and how we can help them to be able to see the transparency and fly safely, and give them the one-on-one service that I believe they deserve. And we're keeping this, our private client group, very small and niche-y.
Bobby Harris: It's not a scalable product. We're only gonna work with wealth managers to find out who in their client base are best suited for our flights. And that's it pretty much. It's very simple. We're excited about this industry, and I want to be their friendly home to figure out how to do this without having to pay $1 million.
Paul Ayotte: And friendly you definitely are, Bobby. And I like to conclude our podcast with thanking you for being the subject matter expert today, and coming on and sharing your knowledge with our listeners. If you are listening to this and would like to get ahold of Bobby directly, you can reach him at bobby@flyjbl.com.
Paul Ayotte: Or you can reach out to any of your Fidelis team members that would be happy to put you in touch with Bobby. Thank you for listening, and have a wonderful rest of your day.
