Patrick Ky and Fiona McFadden visited the Netjets Offices in Lisbon on 23 October 2012. They were hosted by Chief Operating Officer Mark Wilson and Operations Manager Pascal Lhoest. The company owns and controls a private fleet under a fractional ownership model– a total of 750 private jets, with 130 in Europe. NetJets Europe flies nine different aircraft types, from the 7-passenger Hawker 400XP to the globetrotting 14-passenger Gulfstream G550 with about 800 pilots and 500 support staff. Each of its 1,500 customer have bought an average of 75-100 flight hours/year with a Netjets promise to deliver a flight within 10 hours of request. Bought by Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett in 1998, NetJets is the world’s strongest private aviation company.

Netjets is one of SESAR’s airspace user partners who has been active on SESAR since the inception of the programme. The Netjets concept is to ‘fly anytime, anywhere’ so destinations need to be accessible. The Netjets team is working to ensure that the airport hubs do not completely swallow up the airspace and SESAR should help them in this task by refining the amount of airspace used by the big airports. Mark Wilson went on to explain that “ideally, the pilots only need a cloud break and a satnav approach to serve an airport, most of which are either military or regional airports”. The key for Netjets is therefore to maintain an entry corridor to these airports. Practically-speaking, “Netjets seek equipment that brings added-value in respect to capacity or safety enhancement, rather than just equipping for technologies sake”.

And they, of course, look to SESAR to deliver this requirement.