"Scott T. Jensen" wrote in message
...
Anyway, what struck me odd was
that no airline company ... not even small ones ... are in the private jet
charter business. I've seen other TV programs about private jets or where
they're at least talked about for a bit and none of these ever mentioned
airlines getting into the charter jet business ... or even why they're not
in them. Why aren't they?

I guess the main issue is that airlines exist to fly people to and from
places, not to rent aeroplanes and crew to other companies, and to move away
from one's core business is often a bad move. Your average airline will have
purchased or leased only as many aircraft as it requires to fill its
services, because to have aircraft sitting on the ground waiting for charter
rentals to come along is bad economics - if you're running your airline at
all well, you shouldn't have any "spare" aircraft available for charter.

If you're going to run a charter operation you need to aim high. You can't
get by with one or two aircraft available infrequently, because your clients
will want to be able to rely on aircraft supply to a reasonable extent. But
you can't keep aircraft hanging about just in case they're needed, as this
incurs maintenance and hangarage costs. Okay, you'll have some customers who
give you regular bookings, but even if you manage to land a regular
two-flights-a-week contract from, say, London to Majorca, this may become
only one flight a week in the winter, and you're stuck with an aircraft
that's not being used. The economics start to become attractive when you
have a decent size pool of aircraft serving a healthy collection of clients
in a variety of markets (so that the same hardware and personnel can be used
by a number of different people serving different markets, and thus be
required by each at a different time of year).

This said, I can think of at least one example of a large airline making
money from charters on its aircraft: British Airways used to rent out its
Concordes and crews to charter companies. Concorde was, however, an
exception to the rule of aircraft inventories - BA was stuck with a handful
of Concordes, and it made sense to charter them out instead of having them
sitting in hangars costing money to maintain.

Dave