Charter, Card, Share or Aircraft

Four arrangements

The four are usually presented as a ladder of spending. 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 found for a specific trip. Nothing is committed beyond that trip, and nothing is guaranteed before it. Availability on a particular morning in August is whatever the market holds that morning.

A jet card. This is a block of flying hours bought in advance from an operator or programme, at agreed hourly terms. Availability is guaranteed, provided the flight is requested within a stated notice period.

A fractional share. This is part-ownership of a specific aircraft, bought for a fixed term. It is flown under a management agreement, with a monthly management charge and an hourly charge for the hours flown. At the end of the term the share is sold back on agreed terms.

Whole ownership. The aircraft, its crew, its hangar and its maintenance all belong to the owner.

Who operates the flight

An AOC (air operator certificate) is the certificate a company needs to operate commercial flights.

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. That company answers for the crew, the maintenance and the safety of the flight. What an air charter broker is explains why the company selling the flight is so often a different company.

What a card buys

A card does not buy an aircraft. It buys two things: hours at terms fixed in advance, and a promise about availability.

That promise is what you are paying for, and its conditions define it. There are four to read:

• The callout notice: how many hours ahead a flight must be requested for the guarantee to apply.
• The peak days, when the guarantee is suspended or the notice period lengthens. In Europe those days fall exactly in the Greek summer.
• The service area within 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 its 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 kept in a hangar, maintained to a programme, insured and kept airworthy to a schedule that takes no account of the diary. Somebody has to run the operational side, either an in-house team or a management company appointed to do it.

Owners who charter their aircraft out place it on an operator’s AOC. That puts the aircraft under the 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. 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. So an EU-licensed operator can 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. Those do not generally extend to carrying passengers commercially between two points inside another state. The trade calls this restriction 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.

This has two practical consequences. First, a non-EU-registered aircraft flying a non-scheduled commercial flight into Greece also needs a permit from the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority. The lead time is set out in what an FBO is. Second, an owner’s own aircraft, flown privately, is in a different position from a chartered one. That is a question for an aviation lawyer 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, planned flying favours charter. Frequent, short-notice flying favours a card. Heavy, consistent flying 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 it must be the same aircraft, with the same crew, configured a particular way, then you are describing a share or an aircraft. Every arrangement before it is a compromise that will disappoint.