✈️ The VIP Seat Weekly
Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh.
August 26th, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 34 Companion
🎙️ Special Guest: Tal Keinan, Founder and CEO of Sky Harbour
Five things every owner, operator, and flight department should take from an hour with the man who decided to go fix the hangar shortage himself.
He grew up in military aviation, spent a decade running an investment firm between Tel Aviv and New York, then bought a Beech Baron to move his family around and ran head-on into the same hangar shortage the rest of us have been complaining about for twenty years. Most people shrug and get on the waitlist. He went and read the FAA grant assurance guidelines. What came out of that is Sky Harbour, a publicly traded company building hangar campuses for based aircraft only, at airports where almost nobody can get land. Fair warning before you read on: Jessie mentioned on the show that she is a small personal investor in the company, and nothing below is investment advice. Below are the five lessons worth carrying into your own operation. Sit back, buckle up, and lets take off.
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💡 Five Lessons From Tal Keinan
The following are takeaways and opinions from our guest and don’t necessarily reflect the opinion of The VIP Seat. They’re presented from his perspective.
1. The hangar shortage is a policy artifact
The federal government built thousands of airports in the 1930s and 1940s, first as a New Deal employment program and then to out-train every air force on earth, and after the war it divested the whole system. The hangar shortage is partly an airport-economics and land-use problem. Many public-use GA airports are municipally or regionally owned and operate under FAA grant assurances when they accept federal airport funding. Those assurances shape how airport land and access are managed, but they do not make private-hangar development simple. The Airport Improvement Program supports eligible public-airport capital projects; while some airport-owned aeronautical hangars can qualify, it generally is not a funding source for a premium private-hangar campus like Sky Harbour’s.
So for forty years the fix has been to lean on the FBOs. FBO makes its money outdoors, pumping fuel, and by regulation you cannot pump fuel indoors. Hand an FBO a finite piece of dirt and it will rationally want ramp, not hangar. Transient traffic is the best business on the field, high margin and low cost to serve, while the based Global 8000 “hangar queen” occupies twelve thousand feet of hangar is the worst. Every party in that chain is behaving sensibly. The aircraft owner is the only one holding the bag, which means the shortage does not resolve on its own and you should not plan as though it will.
2. 91 Operations want to calculate basing cost as one number, not two (or more)
Many 91 operators want to calculate their basing cost cumulatively, rather than rent in isolation or fuel in isolation. Its also how you can control the customer experience from end-to-end instead of relying on the FBO constraints for fueling.
Sky Harbour charges well above the alternative and everything is bundled into the rent, so there is no menu of fees (i.e., towing, GPU, water, ice, and lav charges). This also allows services FBO’s can’t, including residents who board and deplane entirely indoors, security sweeps run before the principal ever arrives, and a protocol that goes from hangar door closing to airplane positioned, chocked, and ready to start in roughly three minutes. If you are comparing a based rate to a based rate, compare what is inside it.
3. The ground lease is the entry ticket, and there is no fast version
For anyone who has been pitched on developing hangars as easy money, this is your cold shower. Securing land on an airport is the hardest part of this business, and every campus has been a multi-year grind. PDK, for instance, took six years. Sky Harbour runs a target list of a little over a hundred airports and has a site acquisition team that started with three Navy pilots, added more Navy pilots, and now spends north of two hundred days a year on the road. No single airport manager can hand you a lease, so most of that relationship work is not about closing.
Two structural quirks matter here. Because of the non-discrimination provisions inside the grant assurance guidelines, airports have largely settled on charging everyone the same ground rent, which means you do not win on rent, you win on what you are proposing to build. Sky Harbour models their ground leases out to fifty years and assumes no extension. Their working theory is that the time to ask for one is well before expiration, in a year when a city would be glad to see the money.
4. Supply is frozen and the fleet keeps growing, so where do you go?
There will be no meaningful number of new airports, because where there is a need for one there is no land, and where there is land there is no need. Our guest's framing is that hangar space is like real estate in Manhattan, they’re not making more of it. Meanwhile the demand side compounds in a way almost nobody bothers to measure. Sky Harbour tracks the square footage of the US business aviation fleet, calculated as aircraft count times length times wingspan, and says this footprint has grown by more than forty-five million square feet net over the last fifteen years. More airplanes, longer, wider, and lasting longer in service. Add winglets, which quietly killed the old trick of stacking a hangar to a hundred and fifty percent occupancy when everyone is home, and the effective supply is worse than the square footage suggests.
The practical consequence for flight departments is the repo airport. A primary airport is where the airplane lives and the passengers board. A repo airport is where the airplane lives and the passengers do not. Bradley, Connecticut is now functionally a New York City airport, and there is a growing list like it, driven by hangar scarcity, state tax treatment, fuel price, where crews want to live, and increasingly where maintenance talent actually is. Nobody thinks repositioning empty legs is good for the ATC system, the airframe, or your fuel bill. Budget for it anyway, because the alternative is a Teterboro waitlist that is not moving. The other structural call worth tracking: the FBOs are leaning further into high-margin Part 135 transient work, which leaves the Part 91 based fleet in a pickle. This is who Sky Harbour is trying to target.
5. Fixed-rate debt against escalating rent is the whole model, and Wall Street has not picked Sky Harbour’s comp
Here is the underwriting, in Tal’s telling, and it is a genuinely interesting structure whatever you think of the stock. On the revenue side, multi-year leases carry annual escalators of CPI with a four percent floor, and management has begun highlighting re-lease-rate data, which it said was just under 20%, alongside low observed churn. As with any developing portfolio, readers should treat those figures as company-reported operating metrics rather than a guarantee of future rent growth. On the cost side, the largest line is interest, and Sky Harbour is eligible to issue tax-exempt private activity bonds. He said the first issuance priced at a blended 4.18 percent fixed for thirty-plus years and is assumable if the business ever sells, with a more recent junior subordinated unsecured issue at six percent flat. Fixed cost of debt, escalating rents, ground rent creeping at one to two percent, and the spread widens with time. They are also grinding construction cost down, from over $300 a foot to a current maximum price around $242, partly by owning the pre-engineered metal building manufacturer and acting as their own general contractor. The less obvious benefit of that is the one to remember: a lower build number expands the map, because airports that cannot clear a double-digit yield on cost today can clear it at a cheaper cost per foot.
The market side is where he was most candid, and all of it is his read rather than ours. He believes the bond market understands the business and the equity market does not yet, and he named Lord Abbett, BlackRock, and Nuveen among their bond investors. He pointed to de-SPAC warrants expiring in January, struck at $11.50, and said he thinks associated delta hedging and a large short position have weighed on the stock. Tal reaffirmed guidance for a positive annualized adjusted-EBITDA run rate of $4 million to $6 million by year-end 2026. That is forward-looking guidance, not a statement that the company has already reached positive adjusted EBITDA.
On the perennial should-you-be-a-REIT question, his answer was yes eventually, but only for the property portfolio, because the part of the company that knows how to go get land on an airport is a machine a REIT investor would never think to value. And on the SPAC itself, he would do it again. He kept control, took a hundred-million-dollar backstop from the sponsor, and figures he is happy being public about five days out of seven. In this market, that may be the most honest sentence a public company CEO has said all year.
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Disclaimer: The VIP Seat Weekly is for informational and entertainment purposes only. This issue summarizes the opinions of a guest speaking in a personal capacity. Statements attributed to our guest reflect his views and his own analysis, and are not presented as statements of fact by The VIP Seat, its hosts, or any company named. Coverage of publicly traded companies reflects the personal opinions of the hosts and does not constitute investment, financial, tax, or legal advice, nor a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Jessie Naor has disclosed a small personal investment in Sky Harbour. The hosts are not registered investment advisors and may hold positions in companies discussed. All investments carry risk. Readers should conduct their own research and consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decision.
