Charter an airplane

There are many reasons to want or to need to charter an airplane. Rescue of people who are sick or who are involved in an accident at a place without medical facilities, coordinated travel by large groups of people, the need to visit a place with at least minimal airport facilities but without scheduled flights and business operations of large corporations with offices and manufacturing sites at many different locations, all call for the charter of an airplane.

The first step if you wish to charter an airplane, is to find a reliable and certified operator. It is possible to charter an airplane on the Internet, but there is a risk that the operator lacks the resources and the will to provide a safe journey. Original documentation that licenses a person or a company to operate chartered flights, papers that establish the fitness of an aircraft to operate and those relating to insurance, need to be checked for the fine print and in detail. It is best to charter an airplane from a source with strong credentials, an established reputation for safe service and one with a bank of satisfied and regular customers, who are willing to vouchsafe the quality of service they have received from the charter operator.

The next step after short-listing one or a set of charter operators is to negotiate a quote of charges. The quote is likely to be in terms of the number of hours of flying time. It may also be on the basis of distance. The quote may be all-inclusive or it may specify surcharges for parking, preparation and local taxes. The quote would most likely have a margin for unexpected deviations and delays caused by weather and peak traffic. Tailwind and headwind can shorten or lengthen a flight by a significant amount, so the quote would include an approximation in this respect. The actual cost of a charter flight to the operator can vary quite substantially and he or she would quote, taking these risks into account. Some clients may wish to share this risk and can then ask for a base quote on an optimistic basis of the shortest flight time and distance, and agree to overages for delays and deviations from the planned flight path. The latter is difficult for the client to check and hence quotes on mileage basis are best avoided.