A Dollar of Flying for Fifty Cents

Why this page exists

Jet card pricing is normally boring. Most programs publish a rate, adjust it once a year with fuel, and occasionally offer a modest signing credit. That is what a functioning card business looks like, and it is what nearly every provider in the category is doing right now.

One company is not.

Prepaying for flying is not unusual. Most serious jet card programs, including ours, ask you to fund an account before you fly. That is not the issue. The issue is what a company does with that money before you use it, and whether the price it charged you was ever economically credible in the first place.

Over the past two years a single Denver-based broker has run an escalating series of promotions: a $25,000 credit on a $100,000 card in July 2024, $500,000 in flight credits for a $250,000 deposit this May, and four separate promotions in eleven days this month, the latest, by our calculation, cutting a blended rate roughly 40% below market for the aircraft involved, against list-price comparables. Nobody else in the category prices this way.

Understand what you are being asked to do. You wire six figures, it is non- refundable, and you draw it down over the next year or two. The very thing that makes this offer attractive is the same thing that should worry you. A discount this deep is not a gift. It is a signal about what the company needs from your deposit, and about whether it can deliver on the promise before that need catches up with it.

The offer

Forty flight hours (twenty light, twenty super-midsize) for $240,000 including tax. Ten available. The fourth promotion from the same broker in eleven days.

Strip the federal excise tax and they collect $5,581 an hour.

What an hour actually costs

Four things stack on top of each other before this aircraft ever gets you in a seat: what it costs to fly it, what it costs to own it, what the owner needs back just to break even, and what it costs to reposition the plane to you. The table below walks through those four in order.

Super-midsize, Challenger 300 class. Current fuel. Four hundred hours a year.

Maintenance is not a repair bill. Engine and airframe reserves accrue every hour the engines turn, on a schedule measured in hours flown, whether or not anything is wrong. Skip the accrual and you have not saved anything. You have borrowed against an overhaul you already owe.

Twenty percent repositioning is the generous end. That is an efficiently routed book. Thirty percent is the working industry number, and one-way flying passes it quickly. Every point above twenty widens the gap below.

The gap

Run it as a P&L. Per hour, at 20% repositioning, the friendliest assumption available:

Gross margin is negative before anything else is counted. Everything below that line is still to be paid: commissions, payroll, offices, technology, insurance, legal, marketing, typically 15–25% of revenue in a brokerage. A business that needs roughly +20% gross margin to cover OpEx and reach breakeven is running at –30%.

Forty hours in, the card is $67,000 underwater. Ten cards on offer: $670,000. At 30% repositioning it is $91,188 a card. At 40%, $115,376.

“It Is Promotional Pricing. They Make It Back at Scale.”

That argument comes from software, where the ten-thousandth customer costs nothing to serve. In aviation the ten-thousandth hour costs exactly what the first one cost. Fuel does not get cheaper. Crews do not work for less. Engine reserves do not scale. Selling more of a loss makes a bigger loss.

The margin at list price, best case, is about $1,400 an hour on a super-midsize. Every $1,000,000 of operating expense needs roughly 700 hours sold at full freight just to reach zero on that line, and none of it is small money here. The same company has a multi-year Formula 1 team partnership with branding on the cars and both drivers’ race suits, a PGA TOUR co-title sponsorship running since 2025 and renewed through 2027, and a single tournament giveaway (a $250,000 credit to the winner plus five hours to every player who makes the cut) that alone runs north of 300 flight hours, over $2,000,000 at their own published rates. None of it is funded by the flight hours. The flight hours lose money.

So where does the money come from?

The math does not tell us how the gap is funded. It tells us there is a gap. That gap could be covered by outside capital, profit from another line of business, unusually favorable sourcing, expired or unused balances, a future price increase, or the deposits still sitting on the books for hours not yet flown. We do not know which. That is not a claim about anyone’s intent, and it is not ours to prove from the outside.

But for a buyer wiring six figures in advance, the important question is not which explanation an outsider assumes. It is whether the provider can explain it.

Jet It was the 14th-largest management company in the U.S., selling fractional hours at $1,600 all-in. It ceased operations in 2023. One of its own owners, FLYING Media Group CEO Craig Fuller, said the company lost money on every owner flight because it did not understand its unit economics.

Four promotions in eleven days looks more like a funding requirement than a marketing calendar.

What you can check

Two public competitors, each from their most recently filed 10-Q:

Neither is doing anything improper. That is the category norm: audited, filed, checkable. Both are public companies, so both file quarterly with the SEC. Pull the 10-Q yourself at sec.gov/edgar and look at the same two lines: cash and cash equivalents, and deferred revenue. New filings post roughly every 90 days, so check the current one; these figures will already be dated by the time you are reading this. It takes five minutes and nobody has to take our word for it.

This ratio is not a measure of solvency on its own, and it does not tell you whether a company can meet its obligations. Businesses also carry receivables, credit facilities, and other assets that a single balance-sheet line will not show. It is one useful question to ask, not a verdict.

You cannot pull a 10-Q on a private company. What you can do is ask directly, and how a company answers tells you nearly as much as a filing would.

Four questions. Ask us too.

1. If I want out, what comes back?
2. What is the rate lock, and what happens to my money after it expires?
3. Show me every promotion you have run in the last twelve months. The trend tells you more than the offer.
4. What is your ratio of cash on hand to customer deposits held? Public companies disclose it. Ask a private one to.

A provider who will not answer the fourth question has answered it.

Ours

Refundable. Unused funds and hours come back on request. Deposits are held in a segregated account, with view-only access to a dedicated Chase account so you can watch the balance draw down. Third-party escrow available on larger deposits, using an agent you choose. We do not own aircraft, so member money is not servicing a fleet.

We publish our rates. We are not the cheapest number on the page. This is why nobody who is should be trusted with a wire.

intelligence@outlierjets.com · 1-866-JETS247