✈️ The VIP Seat Weekly
Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh.
September 23rd, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 38 Companion
🎙️ Special Episode with Kenn Ricci of Directional Capital and Flexjet
Six observations on where this industry actually stands, from a man who has spent four decades building the operator side of it.
He bought his first aviation company in 1980 with a bank loan, founded Flight Options in 1998, and in 2013 led the acquisition of Flexjet from Bombardier.
While in London recording an episode with he and Steve Varsano of the jet business (will be released next week), Kenn wanted to stay behind and give us his perspective as an operator on the state of the industry.
You can listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Youtube. While you’re there, leave us a 5 star review!
Sit back, really buckle up for this one, and let’s take off.
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💡 Six Observations On The Industry from Kenn Ricci
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. "We're all private aviation, but we're really not aligned anymore."
The working assumption for most of the last forty years was that FBOs, maintenance providers, manufacturers and operators were all part of a single business called private aviation, with roughly aligned interests. That assumption, according to Kenn, has quietly stopped being true. This isn't a claim that the other camps are enemies. Ricci is explicit that he doesn't want anyone in the industry to fail, since not every customer ends up at Flexjet and a bad first experience somewhere else eventually costs everybody. What's missing is an organized body whose only job is the operator's interest, including when that interest runs directly against an FBO's or a manufacturer's.
The squeeze lands hardest on the operators with the least leverage. The structural problem there is that there’s no collective body for the operators to hold those others accountable. While Kenn says it isn’t official yet, he is calling on operators to come together to go to the others in order to get what they want.
2. The easiest selling environment in forty years has a shelf life
The industry he grew up in had to go sell the product, seduce people into it, explain why an extraordinary amount of money bought a better life. Now larger aircraft are moving to younger buyers and the sales conversation is a different one entirely. Four recessions into a career, each triggered by something different, he doesn't believe nothing bad happens for the next ten years. Only the paranoid survive. The threat he names first isn't a competitor. It's the industry getting comfortable with how easy selling has become.
The same worry runs inside his own companies. When he stands in front of Flexjet leadership there's a lot of green on the board. Hours under management up, sales up, profitability up, cash up. The question that follows is how you motivate a team that's already winning. His answer this year has been to point the company at its own standards instead of at its competitors. The counterpoint from our side of the table was the obvious one: the surprise is always the thing everybody had stopped expecting. It's an odd note to hear struck from the top of a company that is winning, which is probably why it is worth hearing.
3. The manufacturers repriced their own risk, and the leverage went with it
The manufacturer across the table is running a different business than the one most negotiating playbooks were written against. Fifteen years ago the OEM had to commit to engines and long lead parts three years ahead, build the airplanes, and then go find buyers, which is how whitetails got made. Go back to the founding of NetJets: Richard Santulli took twenty unsold Hawker 1000s on consignment and sold them fractionally, and the manufacturer said yes because that was the world it lived in. Today, order books run years out, aircraft are pre-sold, and the manufacturer carries far less inventory risk when it commits to those engines.
The second shift is that the OEMs no longer want to be asset sellers at all. Everyone wants service and subscription revenue, with Bombardier's push in that direction the most visible example. Put the two together and the leverage has moved. In the old market it was hard to sell and easy to buy: call a manufacturer, get taken to dinner, get twenty percent off on a large order. You never get both halves in your favor at the same time, and right now the industry has a waiting list instead of a discount. Ricci's read on the rest of the supply chain is blunter still: private equity's arrival in the FBO and maintenance businesses raised costs, raised prices, and degraded service. The discount and the service economics moved at the same time, in the same direction, and not toward the operator.
4. The parts problem is a documentation problem
You can't shop what you can't specify. Operators don't receive full technical documentation when they buy an aircraft, and wiring diagrams are the example Ricci reaches for. Without source data and source intellectual property there's no practical route to a PMA alternative or an approved alternate repair method, which means there's no competitive pressure on the part price at all. His read is that operators are entitled to more of that material than they get, and that the posture on the other side amounts to daring the industry to litigate. The airlines, by comparison, get this material as a matter of course, and nobody in the room had a clean explanation for why business aviation doesn't. His argument is that not providing the documentation is actually illegal.
What follows from that is political rather than commercial. The ask is coordinated pressure through the FAA to open access to source documents, on the theory that access is the precondition for competition and competition is the only durable route to a lower cost per flight hour. That takes a lobbying group, and no group exists today whose sole brief is the operator's interest. A recurring theme from the conversation.
5. The event fee fight is hurting both operators and airport authorities
Airport authorities have effectively handed the FBOs wide latitude on special event pricing, and an event fee is in substance a charge for using airport infrastructure. So when a five figure event fee gets collected, the question is why it lands with the FBO rather than with the authority that owns the concrete. Fifty thousand dollars was the example Ricci used. The physical stress falls on the airport regardless: overflow parking, saturated ramps, and in some cases runways taken out of service to store airplanes. He's told the FBO chains directly that goodwill in the industry is running thin and that it isn't a position they want to occupy.
"I've told the FBO chains, you guys don't want to be in this position. We're all starting to hate you."
The counterargument he volunteered himself is the most interesting part of this section: the deeper problem is infrastructure that isn't growing. There isn't enough ramp space, and nobody has a good answer for how you build another runway at Teterboro. The threat becomes to light jet operators. If the large cabin aircraft outbids the light jet for a landing slot every time, and the small aircraft gets priced off the airport entirely. Second tier fields thirty miles out may become the relief valve. None of it is a near term fix, which is rather the point.
6. Kenn is going to fix it with capital via a SPAC
Complaining about parts prices is one thing. Funding an alternative is another, and the fourth item on the list is the one Ricci controls outright. It's a SPAC. The board is seated, he expects to fund it before the end of the year, and the target is roughly three hundred million dollars to back companies competing in PMA parts and aftermarket services. The condition he plans to attach to the money is the detail worth noticing: a company funded out of the vehicle can't make its product exclusive to any operator. The reasoning is practical rather than charitable. Exclusivity is exactly what turns a promising aftermarket supplier into an acquisition target for the incumbent it was built to compete with.
He's specific about what's addressable and what isn't. Wheels and brakes he calls a solvable problem with people already working on it. He can name roughly ten parts categories worth attacking, sized off Flexjet's own cost data, and offered one example: a component common to the Praetor and the Challenger, same manufacturer, same part, different part number, and a price that can differ by a factor of five.
The sharpest line of the hour is about engine programs themselves, which he argues stopped making financial sense years ago whether you operate one aircraft or three hundred. Plenty of operators and lenders will argue that one back hard. The same goes for the industry's long standing aversion to PMA parts, which he treats as a legacy posture the airlines never shared. The through line is that information about fixes should move freely, and he says he'll go first.
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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. References to a prospective investment vehicle are forward looking statements of intent and are not an offer or solicitation of any kind. 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. 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.
