Tailwinds

Dubai-headquartered Vista Global Holding has successfully challenged the idea of corporate ownership of private jets. Thomas Flohr, its founder and chairman, is now knocking on the door of commercial airlines and is forcing a rethink among the latter’s top-tier customers

- VARUN GODINHO

When we speak to Thomas Flohr, he hasn’t slept for 36 hours straight. The 61-year-old founder and chairman of Dubai-headquartered private aviation firm Vista Global Holding, has just finished competing at the 24 Hours of Le Mans – his team finished 11th, although they had a decent shot at the podium had it not been for a drive shaft that broke four hours before the end of the race. Still, for someone who has been on an octane-fuelled adrenaline rush for nearly two days, pushing the limits of a Ferrari without any sleep, he’s remarkably animated when talking about VistaJet. It is, after all, a company he started ground up back in 2004 and which has now grown into one of the world’s largest on-demand subscription and charter private jet aviation companies.

In the nineties and early noughties, Flohr had a career in assets financing with no background in the private aviation business. He was accustomed to using private jets to be in multiple locations for several meetings a day, but in the process noticed two glaring inefficiencies: the underutilization of corporate jets and the lack of a floating fleet infrastructure.

He asked his analyst to run the numbers, and what he saw was all the convincing he needed to start VistaJet. “The addressable market of corporate jets was 22,000. And the average utilisation of each is 250 hours per year. This is such an underutilisation… commercial airplanes are flying 4,000 hours per year.

“If we were to use these private jets for 1,000-1,500 hours per year, how would the price point look like for our clients compared to full aircraft ownership? If you utilise an asset four times as much as your competition – the competition being aircraft ownership by a corporation – you become so much more competitive,” says Flohr, who therefore positioned VistaJet as the ultimate challenger to corporate ownership of private jets.