Fractional Ownership

CitationAir (nee CitationShares) is now a wholly owned entity of Cessna Aircraft. The manufacturer recently acquired the final 8 percent of the financial interest. The program began in 2000 as a fractional share company, half owned by Cessna and half by TAG Aviation. In the years since, the program has grown and evolved to include […]

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that you don’t know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out. Well, the tide has gone way out on the fractional jet ownership business, and everyone involved is swimming naked, or at least is down to the skimpiest of Speedos. And that’s why CitationShares has remade its […]

Building on its successful fractional equity program, Dallas-based PlaneSmart has launched a new scheme to get pilots into a late-model Cirrus. The new program allows customers to sign onto a fractional lease, as opposed to purchasing an equity position in an aircraft. The result is lower up front cost, though the monthly management cost is […]

Though some projections call for fractional operator NetJets to return to profitability by the end of next year, new management has nevertheless announced plans to lower the boom on close to 500 pilots. The layoffs are expected to start as soon as mid-January. The Berkshire-Hathaway owned company has established resource centers for affected pilots and […]

Richard Santulli, the Wall Street mathematician who left Goldman Sachs to form NetJets in 1986, stepped down Tuesday as Chairman and CEO. Santulli is credited with inventing the fractional aircraft ownership business model. Fueled by the Dotcom boom of the early 1990s, the NetJets program soared to huge success in that decade, and the company […]

Some readers might remember that starting back about five years I wrote a series of articles about my experiences flying with two separate small airplane fractional ownership operations: OurPlane and AirShares Elite. The experiences were very positive, and I came to believe that shared ownership (as it came to be called) would be a major […]

****Part 3 of a 3-part series on the AirShares Elite small-airplane fractional ownership program, here on flyingmag.com.**** After a year of flying a share of an AirShares Elite SR22, we weigh in on the future of small airplane fractional ownership and what it might mean to you. For the past couple of years I have […]

Part 1 of a 3-part series on the AirShares Elite small-airplane fractional ownership program, here on flyingmag.com. Last year I did a long-term evaluation of a small-airplane fractional ownership program run by OurPlane. During the nine-month period, I was for all intents and purposes an OurPlane owner, flying a new Cessna 182 along with the […]

I recently finished a half-year evaluation of the OurPlane fractional ownership program, taking control of an eighth share in a brand-new Cessna Skylane. I was looking to see if fractional ownership programs, which are modeled loosely after those used for professionally flown business jets, like NetJets, could translate to owner-flown small airplanes. The OurPlane program […]