How sad it was to learn of APPJ calling in the administrator. It has been a terrible 18 months for the industry which frankly even before the recession suffered from too much capacity.
If you look at the history of Air Partner (Air London) they started as an air taxi and training school in the 1960's 70'. This was all closed down / sold when the decision was made (I seem to recall in the late 1970's / 80's) to concentrate their efforts in charter brokering. This was a very good decision for it made the company and its directors millions. Perhaps they should have stuck to what they know best and avoided the impulse purchase of Gold Air?
Brokers dont like chartering aircraft from Brokers, however, independent APPJ were of their parent company. Once again taking a look in the past, duirng the 1980's McCalpine had a BAC 1-11 which Air London (Partner) were given exclusive marketing rights, the result was that they achieved very little charter work for it as most brokers were concernded of their clients picking up an Air London brochure in the seat back pocket!
It is very difficult to make money operating buiness jets. If you look around at some of the companies that have made a success of it these tend to be the one's that manage aircraft on behalf of private individuals / corporations and keep their cost base as low as possible. They also tend to be very traditional in their management methods; i.e. the owners pick up the costs of operating the aircraft and any income from charter revenues off-sets some of the ownership costs. Of course, these traditional companies are not without their own problems, but they tend to survive because they keep operating costs to a minimum.
Over the last decade we have seen so many companies (Netjets) come into the market place with new idea's; their success has been minimal and some have only been kept going by large parent companies pumping millions into them. The result is that we are awash with too many business jets chasing too few clients; the profitability of the charter market has been diluted and it will take many years and more failures to make it lucrative again.
It is a tragedy when you do see companies fail and people put out of work, such a waste of talent; but I fear that we will see more in the coming months.
I have no axe to grind against APPJ or AP. Good luck to their former employees, I hope they manage to find new jobs.