Originally Posted by
adamj023
Those fractional jet ownership really only work out for the business owner looking to profit. They eat out such a markup that it usually winds up being in the best interests of someone to actually purchase the plane outright and hire their own personnel and staff.
They are sold and marketted but its really a sham business arrangement that isn't in the best interest of the person. Ive looked into it myself out of curiosity and realized that if you purchased your own jet and hired your own personnel and were able to get favorable financing, there is no advantage to fractional jet ownership no matter how they try to sell you.
Delta does have a huge advantage in offering a wide scale commercial aviation airline with cost efficient seating. It works out for commercial, but for private jets, not really.
I don't believe Delta Private Jets is a fractional ownership setup, and NetJets offers leases and hourly cards in additional to ownership options.
While I don't claim to be either an economist or someone who has ever really had a need to research private jet programs, I do have the ability to spend 10 minutes on the appropriate websites. It would appear that you can fund a DPJ account for as little as $50k or as much as $200k at a time. That somehow seems a little bit better than the $50 million pricetag on a Gulfstream that you cited (plus fuel, crew, etc.), even after dividing it into 1/16, which is the smallest fractional ownership NetJets allows.
But I don't really need to crunch all the numbers. The fact that DPJ and NetJets both exist and are successful at all tells me that there is a demand and that their pricing and structure works well for some portion of the population that is arguably intelligent enough to figure that out for themselves (or wealthy enough to hire other intelligent people to figure it out for them).