Wheels Up

The plane was fairly old.

It was a 2004 that somebody had bought and it was on one of those, they have an app called Wheels Up, where basically you can charter a flight on a private jet for your family.

um they ran into some bad weather uh what happened was it was already negative 47 degrees up there everybody knows water freezes at 32 degrees uh fahrenheit zero degrees celsius

yeah i'm just

It would depend on the owner, right? So the owners can insist on a high level or they can pay for the bare minimum.

So this jet was leased by Wheels Up.

So it was somebody who owned the jet but was allowing Wheels Up to operate it or borrow it, if you will, for a cost.

And I would guess the maintenance was probably at least average.

Okay, now you said you either get very inexperienced or very experienced pilots.

And I'm talking about Berkshire Hathaway.

I'm talking about people like Delta Airlines and the programs that they have, our former program wheels up.

If you have balance sheet, You're buying balance sheet and the right investor base.

If you're a broker in your apartment and you're ordering Uber Eats, I'm not sure I'd be sending in a few hundred thousand dollars a clip.

And for some, it may be the JetLinks card.

For some, it may be the FlexJet card.

For some, it may be Wheels Up.

But until you really boil that down, you have to know what the mission profile is to fit there.

This tremendous growth was in large part enabled by the propagation of the on-demand charter business model.

Companies like Wheels Up, NetJets, and XO have revolutionized the industry by simplifying one-off charters of private jets, which makes the means of travel far more achievable for the twice-a-year wealthy leisure traveler.

These private jets are serviced by fixed-based operators, which essentially act as private terminals for hire, and these are also observing record traffic, leading to more FBOs being developed, which is pushing up prices for airport real estate and hangars to an all-time high as well.

So as the industry has grown as large as ever, it's simultaneously more expensive than ever and more frustrating than ever to get access to a private jet.

We're seeing more opportunities to go public and not become lost in the pink sheets, just given the valuation uplift across the board and investor interest.

Um, business aviation, I mean, w- that is a whole nother conversation for a different time, but that whole connotation and rhetoric has changed dramatically since 2020, and with the intr- introduction of new, like, FlexJet and Wheels Up, uh, fractional ownership models, and it's really attracted kind of that upper middle class, uh, uh, group of folks.

And so it's created a whole new, uh, renaissance in that industry.

So I actually think that was a really smart, uh, infrastructure play there in terms of, you know, the opportunities.