Charter, Card, Share or Aircraft
A jet card is a prepaid block of flying hours with an operator or programme, at agreed hourly terms, with availability guaranteed inside a stated callout notice. It sits between chartering trip by trip and owning an aircraft, alongside a fractional share — part-ownership of a specific aircraft under a management agreement. What separates the four is not comfort but commitment and control: what has been paid for in advance, how much notice the aircraft needs, and which company is legally operating the flight.
Four arrangements
The four are usually presented as a ladder of expenditure. They are better understood as a ladder of commitment, because what changes between them is what has been promised in advance and by whom.
Charter. An aircraft is sourced for a specific trip. Nothing is committed beyond it, and nothing is guaranteed before it — availability on a particular morning in August is whatever the market holds that morning.
A jet card. A block of flying hours bought in advance from an operator or programme, at agreed hourly terms, with availability guaranteed provided the flight is requested inside a stated notice period.
A fractional share. Part-ownership of a specific aircraft, bought for a fixed term, flown under a management agreement with a monthly management charge and an hourly charge for the hours actually flown. At the end of the term the share is sold back on agreed terms.
Whole ownership. The aircraft, its crew, its hangarage and its maintenance, all belonging to the owner.
Who operates the flight
| Arrangement | Whose aircraft | Who operates the flight |
|---|---|---|
| Charter | The operator’s, or an owner’s placed with them | A company holding an AOC |
| Jet card | The programme’s fleet, or one it contracts | A company holding an AOC |
| Fractional | Jointly owned, specific aircraft | The programme’s operating company, under its AOC |
| Ownership | The owner’s | Privately, under the non-commercial rules — or an operator’s AOC if it is also chartered out |
The pattern is the same throughout. Whenever a flight is sold, an AOC holder operates it, and that company answers for the crew, the maintenance and the safety of the flight. What an air charter broker is sets out why the company selling the flight is so often not that company.
What a card actually buys
Not an aircraft. Two things: hours at terms fixed in advance, and a promise about availability.
The promise is the product, and it is defined by its conditions. The callout notice — how many hours ahead a flight must be requested for the guarantee to apply. The peak days, on which the guarantee is suspended or the notice lengthens; in Europe those days cluster exactly where a Greek summer sits. The service area inside which the terms hold. Whether the hours expire, and what happens to them if they do.
A card read on those four points is easy to compare. A card read on the aircraft photographs is not comparable to anything.
What ownership brings with it
An owned aircraft is a business, and the flying is the smaller part of it.
Crew have to be employed, trained, rostered and covered when they are ill or on leave. The aircraft has to be hangared, maintained to a programme, insured and kept airworthy against a schedule that does not care about the diary. Somebody has to hold the operational side — either an in-house function or a management company appointed to do it.
Owners who charter their aircraft out place it on an operator’s AOC, which puts the aircraft under that operator’s control for those flights and brings a set of obligations with it. It offsets some of the cost, and it means the aircraft is sometimes elsewhere.
The rule that catches foreign aircraft in Greece
This is the constraint most often discovered late, and it is worth knowing before an aircraft is chosen for a Greek summer.
Inside the European Union, Regulation (EC) No 1008/2008 creates a single air transport market: member states may not require a permit or authorisation for intra-Community air services flown by a Community air carrier. An EU-licensed operator can therefore fly commercially between Greek airports without special permission.
A carrier from outside the Union has no such freedom. Its rights come from air services agreements, and those do not generally extend to carrying passengers commercially between two points inside another state — the restriction the trade calls cabotage. In plain terms, an aircraft registered and operated outside the EU cannot simply sell a flight from Athens to Mykonos. Penalties for getting it wrong run to heavy fines and, at the extreme, detention of the aircraft.
Two practical consequences. A non-EU-registered aircraft flying a non-scheduled commercial flight into Greece also needs a permit from the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority, with the lead time set out in what an FBO is. And an owner’s own aircraft, flown privately, is in a different position from a chartered one — which is a question for aviation counsel before the summer, not for a handler at the ramp.
Which arrangement a diary needs
Two questions settle it more honestly than any comparison of hourly terms.
How many hours a year, and how predictable are they? Occasional and planned favours charter. Frequent and short-notice favours a card. Heavy and consistent is where a share or an aircraft begins to make sense as a structure rather than as a purchase.
How much does the specific aircraft matter? If any well-kept aircraft of the right size will do, charter and cards are efficient. If the answer is that it must be the same aircraft, with the same crew, configured a particular way, then the arrangement being described is a share or an aircraft — and everything above it is a compromise that will disappoint.