Originally Posted by
DrMilano
Yes, flying privately via a private jet partial ownership.
Not all of the 35k MQD Diamonds to be are small business owners putting $350,000 + on a AmEx DL cobranded business card. Could also be the ultra wealthily who fly private within the US and commercial D1 internationally. ATL just opened up a PS private terminal, as sure there will be domestic private jet traffic connecting to Delta D1 international commercial.
Fair enough. I was a bit sceptical that the revenue lost from high DL spenders fleeing to private domestic flights could compete with the loss of the remaining Medallions, but surprisingly there are a lot more private flights in the US than I thought. According to an online source 2022 saw 4.6 million domestic private flights and according to the FAA there were ca. 9 M commercial flights. I wasn't able to find how many private jet passengers there were but even assuming 2 pax per private flight on average would still be almost 10 M private customers flown annually. Compared with the ca. 750 M domestic commercial pax, this is not the tiny population I imagined it to be.