When I first started writing about small airplane shared ownership options back in 1998, there weren’t a lot of choices available. OurPlane had been doing business for a while and had locations (and an airplane or two) at several airports in the United States and Canada. Down in Atlanta, another company, AirShares Elite, was just getting started. Its model, to put several airplanes in one area instead of just one or two, was a different take on the business. But unless you happened to be in one of the very few locations served by one of these two companies, shared ownership was a dream.
Today, almost nine years later, both of those companies have expanded greatly, in terms of both numbers of airplanes and locations, and they’ve been joined in the market by a handful of other serious players, including Texas-based PlaneSmart, which has a business model very similar to that of AirShares. Another startup, iFly, positions itself as a high-end aero club and doesn’t even sell airplanes, just time in them and management services. Even airplane manufacturer Cirrus Design has gotten into the act, establishing a service intended to find partners for would-be airplane sharers.
