Owner Portal Takes Flight

It’s your data – do you have access to it?

BY ALEK VERNITSKY

Portside, Inc. / avernitsky@portside.co W hether you are building your own flight department, or hiring a management company, will you have easy ac cess to your aircraft schedule and financial data? You, your team, and your accountants and tax advisors certainly will need it in order to operate safely, productively, and cost effectively.

F light departments and management companies, big and small, use many software tools. Most use scheduling, accounting, mainte nance tracking, HR, and expense management systems that tend to not communicate effectively with one another, if at all. Until recently, only the largest management companies could afford to integrate all the systems and make the data available to you in a useful way.

Today, owner portal, billing, and reporting technology, built specifically for business aviation, make it much easier for aircraft management companies and flight departments to share schedule, maintenance, and financial data with you and your team in real time.

As an owner, you or your chief pilot should have access to the following data, ideally in real time, on your desktop, tablet, and mobile phones.

Calendar ■ See your own and charter flights, including details such as travel arrangements and catering requests for your own flights. ■ Ability to request flights and make changes electronically. ■ Ability to block time on the calendar so your aircraft doesn’t get chartered when you might be planning a trip. ■ See (and potentially approve) maintenance and crew events, so you know when the aircraft or crew are not going to be available.

Metrics & Stats ■ Cost per hour; fixed vs. variable expenses; categorized expenses; expense and revenue heat maps (indicating how often your aircraft flies certain routes and/or to certain destinations); and route, char ter, and home base analyses are just some of the many metrics you will need to operate your aircraft effectively. Ask if your flight de partment or management company is able to provide your team with ready access to these data in an easy-to-use format. ■ For corporate aircraft used by multiple teams and organizations, or aircraft owned by multiple people, ask if you will be able to slice the data by who is using the aircraft. If all the data are co-mingled, reporting can be very time-consuming and error prone.

Financial & Operational Reporting ■ Ask what financial, operational, and tax reports your management company or pilot will be able to provide, and how they build these reports. Most do so manually, burning hundreds of hours and making mistakes along the way. Your flight department or manage ment company now can have access to reporting tools that make it easy to generate operational, financial, and tax reports, and to do so quickly and accurately. Ideally, reports should be interactive, and easy to extract to Excel and PDF for further analysis. ■ Be sure that you will have digital access to all the expense receipts, particularly if you share the aircraft with others. Being able to produce your own deductible business expenses will make audits go more smoothly.

Monthly statements ■ Ask if you will receive paper/PDF statements or access to a dashboard, providing data on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on a single webpage, so that you and your team can review, analyze, and act on the data. Many owners also prefer to be able to pay in voices electronically via ACH, wire, or even a credit card.

If you are still getting a 300-page PDF monthly statement and not much else, you can do better. Business aviation technology took a few big steps forward during the past few years. The technology is affordable, easy to deploy, highly secure, and available to manage ment companies and small flight departments alike. Make sure you are using the right tools to manage and share your data – it will save you and your team lots of time and money. BAA

ALEK VERNITSKY, co-founder and CEO of Portside, Inc., is a serial technology entrepreneur with 20+ years of sales, marketing, and product development experience, including ten years developing cutting edge, technology-enabled services for commercial and business aviation.

BizAv Buffeted By COVID-19, Economic Uncertainty

The entire business aviation community is taking a big hit, but it will rebound.

BY DAVID COLLOGAN dlcollogan@gmail.com T he business aviation industry, which began the year with optimistic sales and growth expectations, was reeling less than a month into spring as travel restrictions and fears of the Coronavirus – along with widespread economic uncertainty – sharply reduced demand for business air travel.

The impact on business across the U.S. has been a devastating one-two punch. First came wide-ranging business closures man dated by state and local governments to help curb the spread of COVID-19 by reducing public contact. Second, even businesses and industries permitted to remain open have had to resort to layoffs and employee furloughs after some workers were diagnosed with the virus.

In addition, many businesses have decided to purposely reduce output because of falling demand for a wide range of products – au tomobiles, homes, appliances, airplanes, furniture, and even consumer staples like soft drinks.

Low oil prices traditionally bode well for transportation companies. But worldwide demand for oil plunged so far and so quickly oil producers were facing a storage space crisis that threatened to worsen in coming months, and oil price futures were trading below zero.

If all that weren’t dire enough, the Trump Administration was continuing to issue a daily scramble of mixed messages and outright falsehoods about the availability of virus test kits. State governors and many health care officials have decried the lack of test kits. On April 17, the American Medical Association cited “four essentials that must be in place” before relaxing stay-at-home orders: minimal risk of community transmissions; a robust, coordinated, and wellsupplied testing network; a well-resourced public health system for surveillance and testing; and well-resourced hospitals and health care workers.

But despite test kits still being in critically short supply, President Trump and the governors of some states were urging businesses to begin reopening in May in an attempt to jump-start the economy.

All of the negative news manifested itself in a huge drop in de mand for charter aircraft flight. The National Business Aviation Association said April 21: “charter operators across the country are reporting sharp drop-offs in flight requests and activity, in some cases by more than 75% over the same period last year.”

Flight tracking numbers from FlightAware tell the same story. U.S. business aircraft flights in the week of April 15, 2019 (MondayFriday) averaged 11,236 per day, with a high of 12,966 on April 18. For the week of April 13, 2020, (Monday-Friday) business aircraft flights averaged 3,519 per day, with a high of 4,054 on April 17 – and a low of 2,803 on April 13, 2020.

A check of FlightAware’s live tracking data by aircraft manufac turer and model on April 21, 2020 at 1100 EDT revealed fewer than 200 business jets in the air over the continental United States. Worldwide civil aircraft movements of all types are off by approxi mately 80 percent since the beginning of 2020.

NBAA said it welcomed news that the U.S. Treasury Department had begun making payments “to many of the small and mid-sized general aviation air carriers, including FAR Part 135 charter opera tors struggling with the unprecedented financial challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

But NBAA noted those government payments may be used only for “employee wages, salaries and benefits,” leaving operators to find ways to cover an array of fixed costs, including aircraft and fa cility leases, training, and maintenance, all while generating much less revenue.

It will take many months for business aviation flight activity to return to pre-COVID-19 levels. There will probably be consider able consolidation among charter operators. But once people begin to feel safe to travel again, business aircraft will still be the most convenient, safest, flexible, and fastest way to get where you need to be. Business aviation permits you to select your seatmates and set your own schedule. It will help the economy – and the country – recover. BAA

DAVID COLLOGAN has covered aviation in Washington, DC for more than four decades. This award-wining journalist is known as one of the most knowledgeable, balanced, wary, and trusted journalists in the aviation community.

WE’RE HERE FOR YOU

FROM HORIZON TO HORIZON

We want to reassure you, our clients and partners, that we are here to support you, from start to finish, from horizon to horizon.

We haven’t changed. Our business model is designed to adapt to a changing world, and we are moving forward to meet your needs. We’re still here working for you, we’re still researching, and we’re still developing the tools you need to sustain your business and help you grow during this crisis and beyond. We have the intelligence you need when you need it most.

As you work to sustain, to grow, to gain an advantage, we are here for you. Let’s do this together.

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