I couldn’t sleep last night, so I did a little analysis on the fractional ownership side of the new “very light aircraft” segment.

There’s a lot of talk about new business models emerging with this new segment. Eclipse just got their Eclipse 500 certified and Honda is also looking to enter the market, either as an engine manufacturer (they have a small jet engine they’ve developed) or selling a whole plane. Will these new light jets spawn an air taxi industry? Will they create a whole new class of private pilots?

My guess is that they will expand the market for fractional ownership beyond the mogul and movie star demographic to what the financial services industry call the “mass affluent,” people who have enough money to need (or think they need) private banking-like services, above and beyond what they can get at their local S&L. These people have lots of disposable income but they don’t have the millions you need to plunk down for a big jet. They’re what used to be called “rich”, a category now eclipsed (pardon the pun) by the “obscenely rich.” But rich is still a good market to go after.

In order to figure out how much fractional ownership of one of these new jets might cost, I got sample rates from NetJets, the industry leader, for each of three jets on offer: the Raytheon Hawker 400XP and 800XP and the Falcon 2000EX.

I looked at a 1/8 share, which they define as 100 occupied hours per year for five years.

NetJets charges for four things: “acquisition”, management, usage, and misc. I also found the retail prices for those jets, which gave me a ratio for the NetJets “acquisition cost” to retail, which is about 12%.

If you apply that to an Eclipse 500, which retails for $1.3m, you get $160,000.

The other costs, for management and usage, are not as sensitive to the type of plane; you pay a pilot more or less the same whether he’s flying a Hawker 400 or an Honda Jet. You might be able to get away paying a guy a bit less for a smaller plane, but not a lot. Likewise with maintenance; sure, it’s going to be less, but by how much? The reservation system and the other infrastructure are more or less fixed. They need to make their money somehow. I eyeballed the rates for the other segments and decided that it was $10,000/month for management and $1,500 for hourly usage. Maybe if it’s not NetJets these rates are lower. Whatever.

So let’s say you use it for the full 100 hours per year. The hourly cost is $150,000 per year for that. The management costs are $120,000 per year. And the acquisition cost is ‘only’ $32,000 per year.

So you’re left, ballpark, with the use of a jet for 100 hours a year for $300,000/year for five years.

Now, I can’t spend $300,000/year on a jet. But there are a lot of other people who can.

The very light jets typically have a range of 1,000 to 1,500 nautical miles, enough to take someone from their house in New Jersey to their vacation house in Maine, say, or from their local municipal airport in southern California to their clients’ local municipal airport in Colorado.

Day Jet and Linear Air are going to try to use these jets; Day Jet is starting an air taxi service, first in Florida, and Linear Air is selling tickets on regularly scheduled flights (e.g., Teterboro to Nantucket for $415 each way) in the northeast US. It’ll be interesting to see what business model shakes out of this new technology.