Fly privately on your own aircraft for less.
Would you be interested if you could buy a portion of an aircraft or rotorcraft as if you acquired it all but at a fraction of the price? If you plan to fly more than 25 hours per year but do not need or want a whole aircraft, an aircraft fractional share may make sense.
Whole aircraft demand constant attention whether you use them or not. For example, you still must monitor and pay constantly for the operations, maintenance, insurance, crew, management, scheduling, and taxes associated with them.
Although a fractional share may entail premium costs over other travel options, the overall economics may work when you analyze your anticipated “missions” compared to other flight options, including owning, chartering, buying a jet card, or leasing a whole aircraft. A mission refers to your specific and/or general expected plans for business or personal use, including the passengers you bring on board.
Like air charter, fractional share program aircraft can provide supplemental or primary lift, as well as security and privacy. Compared to operating your own whole aircraft, fractional use may mitigate the risk of intruders tracking your program aircraft using publicly available flight-tracking technologies.
What Is Fractional Ownership?
FAR Part 91K applies to and regulates management services and operations of a fractional ownership program. Program managers may, and often do, operate the aircraft under Part 135 (commercial operations), with higher safety standards than Part 91 (private flights), where the program manager has “operational control” but may instead allow a fractional owner to exercise operational control under the FARs.
Aircraft fractional programs allow you to use the same or different aircraft types in a program fleet. A fractional share program consists of two or more airworthy aircraft with one or more fractional owners, but one program aircraft must have more than one owner.
As a core principle of fractional share programs, you acquire an “undivided interest” in a “program aircraft”—a type of property interest that can be leased or purchased. You can buy with cash only and/or with a loan. Each interest carries an agreed number of hours annually corresponding to the size of the share.
For example, based on a total of 800 flight hours per year per aircraft, an owner or lessee can acquire as small as one-sixteenth interest in a “subsonic, fixed-wing, or powered-lift program aircraft” for 50 “occupied hours” (hours in a seat traveling) and a fractional ownership interest of at least one-thirty-second interest of at least one rotorcraft program aircraft for 25 hours.
This article, written by David G. Mayer, Partner at Shackelford, McKinley & Norton, LLP, was originally published by AIN on January 10, 2025.