Great people, and nice business plan when they launched in the good ol' days.
Not sure if it still stacks up in today's market if you just hope everyone downgrades from Netjets to Blink to save money though.
And from what their flight plans reveal, can you really make money if your core traffic just wants a 35 min flight EGLK to EGJJ or EGJB??
FLIGHT GLOBAL reports:
"The first three months have been great, the aircraft has been flying around 12h a day with quick turnarounds" says Blink co-founder and managing director Peter Leiman." and "Leiman says he is eager to take delivery of more aircraft to enable the company to build its network of destinations and deliver its low-cost air-taxi model efficiently: "Three more Mustangs will be arriving next month followed by one aircraft a month until all 45 aircraft have been handed over."
mmmm...forgive my skepticism but "flying around 12 h a day" ...?
Over the last month I believe they flew about 100 sectors on 3 Mustangs; that's an average of one sector for each Mustang a day and somehow I don't think they're averaging 4 h sectors
As for being eager for 3 more this month, well you could get 3 times the utility out of the current 3 before you needed any more; why take any more?
In the same magazine, the other UK Mustang operator seems to shed a much more realistic appraisal of the market for VLJ's today:
"We have five aircraft in the fleet and are getting 350h a year on each one," says Margetson-Rushmore, who has become increasingly sceptical of the air taxi concept. "The jury is still out on the air taxi market," he says.
"These models are based on high utilisation and low cost, but there is simply not enough business to create these operations now. Just to break even you need to be charging more than £1,100 [$1,610) per flying hour and flying more than 600h a year - these numbers can only be achieved in a very good year and even then you have the issue of seasonality."
350 h is 1h a day. That sounds more realistic and PMR talks a lot of sense.
Surely everyone wants the VLJ market to survive, in fact we want the whole industry to survive but we're all kidding ourselves if we think these huge VLJ orders are ever going to materialise at the rate they are talking about.
VLJ's have their place but so long as the operating cost is not dissimilar to the next size up, we haven't achieved any sort of radical change to the industry. Eclipse, Adams, PoGo, DayJet, One Charter, Bikk etc. all talked big in 2008 and look where they are in 2009.
As aviators, we have to do the impossible: fly high, but do so whilst keeping our feet firmly on the ground