Most marketing at the FBO and Air Charter level is broken.
It is not that we are bad, inept or uneducated folk, we just have very poor role models. We never learned how to articulate “why we’re better” or anything that would drive more consistent recurring sales, and let’s face it.. that makes us feel like a rudderless ship when it comes to finding and retaining clients.
Then came NetJets and Signature, who proved to us that people will pay double or triple to ride in the very same aircraft or use the same fuel, or similar FBO for no particular reason other than their logo is cool and they made you feel good as they took your money.
Popularity: 33%
It is good not be alone. At first there was just fellow nerds (ok, gurus!) and academics like the Teal Group. Then there was the blog Richard Aboulafia showed me, and it dawned on me: I’m not alone. One of the most powerful feelings for lackeys like me, is to know that there are other lackeys thinking the same way. Which is really quite simple:
Are we the only ones warily eyeing the VLJ hooplah? The press, the start ups, even a few questionable pilots bang down the door with “what do you think, pretty cool, eh?” Well yes, ofcourse new technology is cool. But what is really happening here?
Popularity: 10%
Thanks to Google’s news feature I can push air taxi news to the top of my queue everyday and read funny tidbits like this. While no one is as crazy as I am about air taxi (I am going to back to air taxi school for F-’s sake!) the reality is that most of what the press seems to be harvesting is misleading to the ultimate end user.
The amazing thing is that investors are actually buying into the whole scheme. Investing in infrastructure to support manufacturing a toy is one thing. (Yes, the VLJs.) Whether the manufacturing and sales of those units makes sense is more the domain of Mr. Aboulafia. Building an industry (that does not yet exist) around a broken culture of air charter that does not yet make money on its own is quite another that I can blab about with some authority.
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Popularity: 14%
Like this asian rice farmer, some days are just not easy to get through. The suction of the mud on the hooves of the beast and the patient farmer do not make rice farming in monsoon season much fun at all.
We can all relate to those days when the spark and magic is gone and we see ourselves plodding through the fields wondering how and why we got onto this track. The rice farmer keeps going for one simple reason - no rice, no food.
Thankfully we can fly things through the sky, and as crappy as we may feel, we look at the tops whiz by the cockpit window on an otherwise dreary overcast day and we can regress to the 12 year old inside ourselves and say “Wow, that is cool… I’m going fast… and it’s sunny here on top.”
Popularity: 9%
The TP 11919 (or PSTAR) is the first step in validating my flying licenses in Canada based on the US ones I have managed to accumulate over the years. It is not often that I trudge off to the Westmount Library for a quiet afternoon of studying, after all, I am 35 on the outside, but well over 60 on the inside.
When I decided to go “back to school” to activate the Canadian equivalent of my US license(s) a lot of odd things popped into my fragile brain thanks to the Canadian CAR’s. (Like FAR’s .. only they are CAR’s… make sense?)
Canada’s written tests for aircraft licenses are different in content mainly due to the fact that our constitution was written by beavers who needed to make sure all other animals had equal representation.
Popularity: 16%