Why Fewer Senior Executives Are Taking the Corporate Jet
Climate criticism, pilot shortages and a desire to stay under activists’ radar have converged to reduce companies’ use of their own planes. But that doesn’t mean they’re flying commercial.
Jets at an airport in Redding, California.
Photographer: George Rose/Getty Images
As pandemic worries have faded, the travel business has come soaring back, with airline traffic more than doubling since its Covid-era trough and waiting times for deliveries of new commercial airplanes mostly stretching through the end of this decade because of robust demand. But there’s one travel segment that seems stuck in a holding pattern: corporate-owned jets.
Even though the number of flights operated by the broader private aviation industry—which also includes charter, fractional and individually owned aircraft managed by third-party service companies—is almost 19% higher than in 2019, the last full pre-pandemic year, companies’ in-house flight departments are flying about the same as they did four years ago. That’s according to data from WingX, a Hamburg-based provider of market data and analysis on the private aviation industry. The reasons abound in an era of pilot shortages, climate critics and a growing number of online jet sleuths who are tracking—and publicizing—the luxe flying at 30,000 feet of both company executives and the rich.