Chartered Air Travel: The Evolution of a Multibillion Dollar Industry

LONDON, November 9, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

Air Partner releases new video studying 22 days of charter flights via Granada, Spain. 

11 October 2015 was the 105 year anniversary of a curious footnote to aviation history - former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt became the first to have both held America's highest office and to fly in an aeroplane. His flight in a Wright exhibition team plane was just the beginning of a tradition of VIP flying that is now a multi-billion dollar industry.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Os-gsSGju0

When the many skilled pilots, technicians and suitable planes of the post-Second World War era created the ideal conditions for rapid growth in aviation, new leisure travel trends in the 1950s inevitably lead to the development of the private aviation industry.

Over a half a century later, the exclusive access that private planes offered to rich-travel hotspots like the French Riviera remains a core part of the industry's appeal. In a 2012 Oxford Economics report, 96% of paired cities served by business aviation had no scheduled connections.

With this and other facts surrounding the evolution of chartered air travel, there is a question of whether private air travel simply arrived at the right time and nurtured emergent trends, or whether it actually made them possible in the first place. For example, modern celebrity is dependent on the ability of individuals to travel around the world in comfort and privacy: our idea of celebrity is largely a product of the 60s and 70s, a period that saw the increasing effectiveness of jet aircraft in terms of range and capacity.

Business use also emerged in this period as a result of these gains in convenience and affordability. The 1980s saw charter increasing in size in terms of infrastructure (European business aviation now employs around 164,000 people) while group demand was growing due to the tour operator business, followed by group travel for sport, music, film and industrial conferences.

Around this has grown a network of air charter companies and brokers who aim to provide added convenience for private and commercial jets, and freight aircraft. Air Partner, an international air charter company, looks at this contemporary picture in a new video accompanying this release. Taking a snapshot of activity in Granada, Spain when flying over 5,000 retailers to a car launch, the video explores larger group flight facts and statistics.