Originally Posted by
gabriel2
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.
Private flights aren’t just for the ultra rich; there are still a good number of hobby private pilots that can do a lot of plane movements. One of my very middle class uncles used to do about 30-50 flights a year on a kit plane he built himself until he felt like he as getting too old to fly anymore and voluntarily turned in his pilot’s license.