NetJets
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| Founded | 1964, United States |
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| Fleet size | 700 | ||||||
| Destinations | Point to point | ||||||
| Parent company | Berkshire Hathaway | ||||||
| Headquarters | Columbus, Ohio, United States | ||||||
| Key people |
Bruce Sundlun (Founder) Paul Tibbets (Founder) Curtis LeMay (Founder) Jesse Itzler (Co-founder) Adam Johnson (Chairman and CEO) |
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| Website | www |
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NetJets, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, is an American company that sells part ownership or shares (called fractional ownership) of private business jets. NetJets Inc. was founded in 1964 as Executive Jet Aviation. It was the first private business jet charter and aircraft management company in the world.
NetJets Inc., formerly Executive Jet Airways, was founded in 1964 as the first private business jet charter and aircraft management company in the world. The founding members of the board of directors included Air Force generals Curtis E. LeMay and Paul Tibbetts Jr., Washington lawyer and former military pilot Bruce Sundlun, and entertainers James Stewart and Arthur Godfrey, with retired Air Force Brigadier General Olbert F. ("Dick") Lassiter serving as president and chairman of the board. EJA initially began operations in 1964 with a fleet of ten Learjet 23 aircraft. Bruce Sundlun became EJA president in 1970, and Paul Tibbets became president in 1976. By the late 1970s, EJA was doing business with approximately 250 contract flying customers and logging more than three million miles per year.
In 1984, Executive Jet Aviation was purchased by mathematician and former Goldman Sachs executive Richard Santulli who owned a business that leased helicopters to service providers of offshore oil operations. When Santulli became chairman and CEO of the corporation, he closely examined 22 years of pilot logbooks and began to envision a new economic model where several individuals could own one aircraft.
In 1987, the NetJets program was officially announced becoming the first fractional aircraft ownership format in history. Around the same time, painted on every NetJets U.S. aircraft was a three-digit tail number punctuated with QS, symbolizing the revolutionary concept of selling Quarter Shares of an aircraft—a feature that is still representative of the NetJets brand today.
One of the first quarter-share Owners of the Hawker 1000 was legendary Berkshire Hathaway CEO, Warren Buffett, in 1995. He quickly determined the fractional ownership concept was the future of private aviation and in 1998, Berkshire Hathaway acquired EJA and NetJets Inc.
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Wikipedia