I was a guest recently of a Netjets owner and was very impressed with their service. We were about to board the plane and the pilot noticed what he thought was hydraulic fluid on the ground below the plane. So he instead directed us back to the FBO, since there was another Netjets plane on the ground and ready to go,

Apparently, since the plane had been in the area, they had flown it over to this airport as a hot spare the night before, just in case.

In the end, the fluid was a false alarm, and we took off in our original plane. But the availability of the back-up was impressive.

The Best Way to Start a Trip

I am the anomaly to the typical fractional owner, I rarely fly for business. My use of private aviation is 85% for personal convenience. I fly in excess of 50 hours a year on my Citation 10, and at times I supplement additional short hops with a King Air or a Pilatus. I was an owner of an aircraft with a previous fractional provider and this is my second plane with Net Jets.

So I fly to maximize my time with my family and my friends. Safety, quality and consistency of execution are what I base my opinion from. Net Jets excels at all three of these to the extent that I look forward to calling them. I literally smile after booking a flight because the service is that good it makes me happy to speak with them!

Private air travel is an absolute luxury, where quality and safety should not be assumed. These attributes will vary significantly from one provider to the next, especially with charter carriers. Jets are machines, subject to weather, and human error. I expect, (for this type of investment), to have the best plane in top condition, to be scheduled by the brightest managers and flown by the most professional pilots in the business. Net Jets meets and exceeds those standards. On a scale of 1 to 10 (being the best), Net Jets is a 9.5!

I bought into this program early and for a time found it worthwhile. At the time I bought in they also had a guaranteed repurchase program making the pricing more attractive. After a few years however I began to experience problems. At first it was just poor service, harried and sullen pilots or mistakes in catering or ground transportation coordination. One summer however, when I happened to be traveling all over the U.S. and Europe for business, I experience four equipment malfunctions in the space of six weeks. In one a front landing strut was broken making us unable to takeoff from a small regional airport. Net Jets demanded I wait six hours for their plane to fly in when a smaller local jet was available immediately. I chartered the local jet and they refused to reimburse me. When I heard other anecdotes of safety problems, I terminated immediately.