A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Jonny Nicol: I got a one-year work clause where I was still on-call and working, but, in reality, I was not going to work. Instead, I used my pilot license which I got from the military to do some freelance piloting. I had three jobs. I was an air display pilot, air ferry pilot, and I flew private jets. That was the birth of my current company. I realized that there was an opportunity, not just to make it easier for rich people to book a private jet, but also to change the way people travel.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this company off the ground?

Jonny Nicol: The first thing I had to do was identify exactly what it was that would enable me to build this thing. I realized that it was impossible for somebody who wasn’t already a private jet customer to charter a private jet. The reason for that is the industry is entirely run by brokers over the telephone. It was an incredibly painful experience for the private jet customer to book an aircraft. We had an inaccessible market.

The second point was that the entire industry has been marketed and run as purely a form of luxury. That is not what private jets are. Private jets are the most amazing way of saving time when you need to move huge distances. That’s all they do. That’s the only reason they built them. They didn’t build them like yachts where you go sail around in a big circle. The reason I know that is because in all the time I’ve been working in aviation, I have never heard of anybody chartering a private jet just to fly around in circles and land again. People only charter private jets when they want to fly somewhere.

We have this situation where the entire industry had failed to communicate to customers what it does and how much it costs. You also had an enormous problem which was that 40% of all private jet flights don’t have a single passenger on board. When I was flying for a charter company in Oxford, nearly half the time I was flying the plane, there was nobody on board.

I was sitting at an airport about four months into this job. I was a freelancer. I was parked up next to a British Airways flight, which was heading back to London. I was due to fly this aircraft to Oxford. It occurred to me that I could take this aircraft to London and then fly to Oxford. It would only cost a fraction more than flying empty. That is the adaptive empty leg. This is the way that we take all these empty legs all over the world. Instead of forcing people to take the flight at 10 in the morning from New York to San Francisco, we can actually offer a huge discount to somebody who wants to go the following day from Washington to Vegas.

Those are the two things I realized I had to fix. That’s what Stratajet is all about. If I could then present that to people who had never thought of flying privately with the argument of how much time they will save, it will actually reinvent the whole industry. You have all these private jet owners out there who desperately want to charter their aircraft out to try and offset some of the ownership cost.

This segment is part 3 in the series : A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet
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