Every way to fly private, sorted by how many hours a year you fly

Charter, empty legs, jet cards, memberships, fractional shares, whole ownership. What each one commits you to, what that does to the price, and the one number that decides between them.

Each seller in this business sells one item off the menu, so the menu itself never gets handed over. The charter broker sells charter, the card program sells cards, NetJets sells shares, and every one of them will explain their item beautifully and skip the rest. There are half a dozen ways to buy the same flight, from a one-time booking with no strings to a multi-year stake in an actual aircraft. Here is the full list, with the commitment each one asks for and what that commitment buys you.

First, the cast: operators, brokers, and FBOs

Everything else hangs on 3 terms. An operator (in the US, a Part 135 certificate holder) is the company that owns or manages the aircraft, employs the pilots, and is legally responsible for the flight: an airline of one. A broker operates nothing. Brokers know the market, source the aircraft from operators, and arrange the trip, and a good one earns the fee by knowing which operator has the right aircraft parked near you at a fair price. Aelion is a broker under 14 CFR Part 295, and the rule requires us to say so.

An FBO, a fixed-base operator, is neither. It is the private terminal at the airport. FBOs sell fuel, ramp space, and hospitality. They are where you park, sit on a leather couch for 10 minutes, and walk out to the aircraft. Everything on this list, from a one-off charter to a wholly owned jet, departs through one. You do not choose an FBO or pay it as a passenger. Your operator picks, and the FBO's address is where they tell you to show up.

On-demand charter: rent the whole aircraft, once

This is the base case. You book one trip, on your dates, on an aircraft an operator or broker sources for you, and you pay for that trip alone. No membership, no deposit, no commitment. When the trip is over you owe nothing further, and you shop the next one from scratch.

The price is quoted per trip and moves with the market: aircraft class, billable hours, repositioning, fees, and tax (the full anatomy is in our quote guide). That is charter's weakness. The same trip can quote differently month to month. It is also charter's strength, because deals exist here and nowhere else on the menu: you are shopping an open market rather than drawing down a prepaid balance. For anyone flying private a handful of times a year, occasional charter is almost always the answer the arithmetic gives.

Empty legs: charter at a markdown

An empty leg is a one-way repositioning flight, an aircraft that has to fly somewhere anyway, sold at a discount rather than flown empty. It is not a separate mechanism so much as charter marked down: the whole aircraft at a fraction of the standard price, in exchange for taking the operator's schedule instead of setting your own. If your dates flex and your route matches where legs appear, it is the cheapest a private aircraft ever gets. The full trade-offs get their own article.

Jet cards: prepaid charter with the edges sanded off

A jet card is prepaid charter. You deposit a lump sum, somewhere between the tens of thousands and a few hundred thousand dollars, or you buy a block of hours (25 hours is the standard size), and in return the program gives you a fixed hourly rate for a given aircraft class, guaranteed availability inside a booking window, and one phone call instead of comparison shopping.

What you are buying is predictability. The same trip costs the same hours every time, peak-day surprises are bounded by contract, and you never wait on a quote. What you are giving up is the market. Your money is committed to one program, the fixed rate is typically set high enough to protect the seller in a bad market, and a card holder never gets the cheap aircraft that happened to be sitting nearby, or the empty leg at half price. The fine print varies enormously from card to card: peak-day surcharges, blackout dates, expiration of funds, interchange rules between aircraft sizes, cancellation terms. Read all of it before any deposit. Read the expiration clause twice.

A jet card converts charter's variance into a flat rate. You are paying an insurance premium against price surprises, whether or not you would have had any.

Memberships and by-the-seat programs

A younger layer sits below jet cards: memberships that sell access rather than aircraft. Some charge an annual fee for members-only pricing or app-based booking on a managed fleet. Others sell individual seats on scheduled or semi-scheduled flights between popular city pairs, boarding through FBOs instead of main terminals. By-the-seat flying can bring the private terminal down toward business-class money. Notice what changed, though. You are back to buying a seat on someone else's schedule and route, and that is most of what private aviation exists to escape. These programs work as a supplement on the routes they serve well, not as a replacement for the rest of the menu.

Fractional ownership: NetJets and the share model

Fractional ownership is where flying private stops being a purchase and becomes an asset. You buy a share of a specific aircraft (a 1/16th share is a common entry point, and by convention it corresponds to about 50 flight hours a year) through a program that operates a large standardized fleet. NetJets is the best-known name here and effectively invented the modern category. Several other providers run the same model.

You pay 3 ways: the share purchase up front, a monthly management fee that covers the fleet's fixed costs, and an occupied-hourly rate when you fly. In exchange you get the strongest availability guarantee in the industry, an aircraft of your share's type, on as little as a few hours' notice, nearly any day of the year, with consistent crews and standards. The commitments are long. Contracts usually run multiple years, your exit depends on the program buying back the share at a depreciated value, and the all-in hourly cost generally lands above what disciplined charter shopping achieves. Fractional is for people who fly so much, so unpredictably, that guaranteed access is worth paying for. The rule of thumb puts that line at 50-plus hours a year.

Whole ownership: the endpoint

Owning an aircraft outright is where the list ends, and it is a business decision more than a travel one. Purchase price, crew salaries, hangar, insurance, maintenance, and management fees run whether you fly or not. The conventional wisdom is that ownership starts to pencil somewhere in the hundreds of hours a year, with 200 to 400 the figures most cited, or when a company's mission demands total control. Many owners place the aircraft with a management company that charters it out when they are not using it, to offset the cost. Those chartered-out hours are part of the supply the rest of this list shops from.

The menu, side by side

So which one are you?

• A few trips a year: charter each trip, and watch the empty legs on your routes
• Monthly, and your time is worth more than the last dollar: price a jet card against your actual routes before you sign anything
• Weekly, short notice, and 'no aircraft available' is not an option: fractional is what that guarantee costs
• Hundreds of hours a year on a fixed mission: ownership, professionally managed
• Solo on a route a seat program serves: try the seat before you buy the aircraft

Our advice is the same for every reader: start with the least commitment and add more only when a year of your own receipts says to. Those receipts tell you your hours, your routes, and how much your dates flexed, and that record is what lets you judge whether a card's flat rate or a share's guarantees would have saved you money. Committing first and discovering your flying pattern second is how people end up with expiring jet-card balances.