The ban on private jets flying passengers from most European countries into the US could lose the industry up to $45m per month in lost charter revenue.
According to business aviation consultancy WINGX, there was a total of 455 business jet flights between Europe and the US in March 2019. The figure does not include departures from the UK and Ireland, which are exempt from President Trump’s ban.
By using 455 flights as a calculation base and adding in an average charter flight price for a Europe to US flight at $100,000, Corporate Jet Investor estimates revenue for Europe to US flights in March 2019 to be $45m.
CJI averaged quotes for a Munich to Chicago flight on the PrivateFly website to get to an average flight price. However, the figure does not differentiate between flights operated privately, and flights operated for charter.
WINGX says that so far in March, there have been a total of 136 flights between Europe and the US.
In conversation with Corporate Jet Investor, Adam Twidell, CEO of PrivateFly, an online charter broker, says that in the morning after the travel ban was announced, it saw a definitive uptick in charter requests for US citizens and their families looking to leave Europe before the ban comes into effect on Friday night.
“We have had a real surge of Americans trying to repatriate themselves,” says Twidell. “We have a flight airborne at the moment [Thursday March 12] The client wanted to leave Tel Aviv as quickly as possible to get back to London so that he can close his apartment down and get back to New York.”
According to VistaJet, the global charter operator, the US is not banning its residents or citizens, or crew members that hold a US category C1/D type visa. “It is restricting passengers who have been present in Schengen countries in the last 14 days,” says a spokesperson.
Nevertheless, the company says that it has been monitoring the situation since the first cases were reported in late 2019 and is “working daily with experts and authorities to update our standards as the situation evolves”.
Although there has been an increase in charter requests and flights, Twidell says that it won’t last. He predicts the new requests won’t help balance the loss of requests from previous customers who won’t be able to fly for the duration of the ban.
“We are fairly constant at the moment because for every new enquiry, we’ve got diminishing requirements from the base of customers who are just not travelling because business travel has stopped,” he says. “There’s an upside to this, and a downside. Probably overall, it’s going to be down.”
