Aiming High

Will the region’s private aviation sector come out stronger at the other end of this Covid-19 pandemic?

- Varun Godinho

Large-volume commercial air carriers are haemorrhaging. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has said that airlines globally are staring at a potential $314bn hit in ticket sales in 2020 alone as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The very idea of thousands of individuals congregating within an airport terminal, and then hundreds of them seated next to each other on a flight is, for the moment at least, an almost incomprehensible reality within the near to medium term.

But that isn’t the case with private jets which ferry passengers through dedicated terminals and then have a maximum of 6-12 passengers seated on an airplane. “Remarkably, over 70 per cent of the demand for private jets that we saw in the past few weeks came from first-time private jet travellers who used to fly first class on commercial airlines,” says Adel Mardini, founder and CEO of Jetex.

Jetex handles logistics, flight support requests and is also a leading operator of private jet terminals (or Fixed Base Operators (FBO) as they are referred to in the industry). Jetex, whose portfolio includes a sprawling 1,600-square-metre terminal located in Dubai South, says that flying private could reduce a customer’s exposure to a virus by more than 30 times compared to flying commercially.