This Private Aviation Veteran Wants To Build A New Version Of NetJets

In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, a voice urges farmer Ray Kinsella to take a swath of his precious corn field and turn it into a baseball diamond, telling him, “If you build it, he will come.” He was Kinsella’s late father who brought along with him the 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball team. It was a high-risk strategy, but the baseball ghosts turned the failing farm into a goldmine as tourists also arrived. Since then, the phrase has been adapted to the world of business. “If you build it, they will come” has led countless entrepreneurs to roll the dice, launching new products and services they believed were wanted but not being offered.

For Mente Group Founder and CEO Brian Proctor, his Field of Dreams moment came in 2021 when he contributed his established aircraft brokerage and consultancy into a 50/50 partnership with private equity firm City+Ventures. They formed Aquila Aviation Ventures, the foundation for a new company called Four Corners Aviation.

The “if you build it” product is something called Freedom by Four Corners Aviation.

Proctor is selling it as the industry’s biggest leap forward since the invention of fractional ownership by NetJets in the 1980s and jet cards by Sentient Jet back in 1999.

The concept copies the software as a services model. It targets companies and UHNWs who have flight departments and own and operate their private jets. The focus is super midsize, large cabin and ultra-long-haul types. The prospects don’t see fractional ownership, jet cards or on-demand charter as a viable alternative. They want to fly in a jet they have configured and furnished to their specifications. They want their own dedicated pilots and cabin crew. They want their own hangar and whatever facilities they currently have.

As Proctor puts it, “They want to reach for the draw under their seat with their own personalized stationery.”

The voice that led Proctor to expand beyond his aircraft sales and consulting business into something more didn’t come from a ghost. It came from a customer, the CEO of a large multinational company.

Proctor recalls, “In 2012, I was in New York. We had just done a fleet plan for a client with a G5, and they were considering upgrading. The CEO was sitting there, and I was sitting in the chair next to him. I had just finished the presentation. He folded it up, and took a deep breath, and said, ‘I absolutely agree we need to upgrade, and I think everything you have in here is right.’”

After stopping and spending what seemed like an eternity, the client continued, “Brian, right now, the last thing on the planet I want to buy is another airplane.”

It was not what an aircraft broker wants to hear. While part of Mente’s model is to offer consulting services to would-be buyers, something it charges for and acts as a pipeline of clients who then use the group to help it acquire their next airplane, the larger part of profits is via fees that come from transactions.

Proctor says, “Sometimes, as an industry, we are selling products our customers don’t want to buy, even when it’s exactly what they need. The conversation haunted me, and it kept resonating.”

The more he thought about it, the more he saw an opportunity. “Customers want to buy safe, reliable, and customized transportation,” he says, quickly adding, “You can get safe everywhere. We have a very safe industry. Reliability fluctuates, but there are reliable solutions. Customization of the flight experience is hard to get unless you buy your own airplane.”

Beyond personalized stationery, interiors, and the same pilots and crews, Proctor believes his services concept speaks to another concern of private jet owners, the increasing price of buying a new airplane. He says in the mid-1970s, a then top-of-the-line Gulfstream G2 cost $2 million to purchase and $500,000-to-$750,000 per year to operate. Today, a G700 runs $78 million to buy and $4.5 million to operate. In other words, the cost to buy has jumped nearly 40-fold compared to operating costs, which are up only six-to-nine times.

“We came up with this idea of the corporate jet as a service, which is Freedom. For the client, it fixes the cost, so it looks a lot like a fractional contract. It eliminates the capital component, so it de-risks the residual and the balance sheet. It improves the optics for the client because now they are now flying privately as a service instead of having this asset that is tied back to their company,” Proctor says.

It also makes everything easier. Owning a jet means dozens of contracts from engine and maintenance programs to insurance, fuel purchasing, catering, and complicated accounting. That all is handled by Four Corners. Customers pay a monthly access fee, hourly fee, fuel adjustments, plus incidentals.

Of course, setting up Freedom wasn’t as easy as doing some market research and putting together a presentation.

Freedom envisions not only buying the aircraft from clients, who then sign a five-year services agreement. It also means taking over the entire flight department, from pilots and cabin crew to facilities, such as hangar leases, all to ensure the experience for the customer remains unchanged from their ownership days.

That meant a lot of work. Four Corners has been staffing up as a full-fledge operator, including acquiring Part 135 charter operators and adding the talent needed to oversee what Proctor hopes will somebody be a fleet of several hundred jets.

The charter certificate is because the model includes earning revenues by using the acquired jets for charter when their former owners aren’t flying them. The first usage will be for other Freedom customers who need supplemental lift when their jets are down for maintenance or pilots are training. After that will be wholesale and then retail on-demand charter, including a jet card program, something Four Corners recently launched. It also meant setting up a management team and operations infrastructure at its Frisco, Texas headquarters.

Jamie Buff, who serves as COO, is an aviation veteran who, after serving as a crew chief for the Air Force on its B-52H bombers, joined the Cessna Aircraft Company as an airframe and powerplant technician. From there, he moved into positions in corporate flight departments at Wachovia Bank, Proctor & Gamble, Nike, Coca-Cola Company and AMB Group.

Buff says Freedom speaks to the disjointed way companies handle flight departments, starting with where in the corporation they report. He says it can vary from legal to HR, finance, or wherever a CEO decades ago decided to stick it.

Because private aviation is a service as opposed to a typical operating unit, flight department members often find themselves short on resources, on the back burner when it comes to getting answers and approvals, and spending time educating overseers who don’t view corporate aviation as a core of what they are doing.

If Freedom sounds like an easy sell, since announcing it in November 2021, Proctor says Four Corners is just now on the verge of signing its first client.

In addition to a long sales cycle, the timing proved not to be ideal. Most companies were just getting back into the swing following Covid travel shutdowns, and with capacity shortages, were not interested in selling.

Buff says another factor is making sure the customer is a good fit. That includes detailing all the elements that go into the transition, including buying their airplanes, staffing, any leases and contracts that come along with it, and then the services agreements.

However, the current challenges for owners of keeping pilots and getting aircraft repaired quickly due to parts shortages combined with the winds of recession, security issues posed by jet trackers, and heightened antagonism from anti-private jet groups are now greasing the skids.

“It is a very clever concept. The second least fun thing about owning a business jet is the process of buying it. The worst is selling it. Four Corners’ idea is designed to take away this hassle. We have seen other companies – including aircraft management companies – try and offer similar products but one advantage of Four Corners is that customers get a lot more choice,” says Alisdair Whyte, Co-Founder of Corporate Jet Investor.

So far Four Corners has 14 aircraft under traditional management agreements, something it plans to expand alongside Freedom. Former NetJets, VistaJet and Air Partner executive Vincent Kavanagh, who is head of sales, says there should be 20 aircraft by midyear. At the same time, Mente continues with its traditional lines of business around aircraft sales and acquisitions, as well as appraisals and even overseeing completions and refurbishments.

When I asked Proctor what happens if the customers never come for his private jet as a service concept, he tells me, “We are fully committed to both platforms on a go-forward basis regardless of the success of Freedom. With Four Corners and our flight department management model, we feel that we are in the process of changing the way management is conducted and have really homed in on a competitive advantage that doesn’t exist in the marketplace.”