Angel Flight Southeast Launches New Website
Chris met Steve Purello, the Executive Director of Angel Flight Southeast, at the NBAA Regional show in Orlando back in February. Steve was there as an exhibitor with his company, First Class Aerospace. We noticed their website was in need of a makeover, so we stepped up. Angel Flight Southeast launches new website donated by us and built by our friends at Aviation Marketing Experts.
When Steve saw the new website he said, “The site looks awesome! That’s great. It is so detailed and perfect”.
Additionally, we have also decided to help them with organizing a series of events in South Florida as well. Since, that’s what we do, too.
As it turns out they had been doing gala events for many years but stopped a couple of years back. Now we’re going to help bring those back and have selected Fort Lauderdale for the first event.
Aviation Marketing Experts also helped us with another website, to announce regional events for select Angel Flight chapters.
The new events site is AngelFlightEvents.com. It will help promote events and it’s all being donated.
Currently we’re promoting:
- Angel Flight Southeast
- Angel Flight Northeast
- Angel Flight West
- More to come..
Any Angel Flight chapter who wants an event promoted can contact us at Events@AircraftGuys.com.
The cool part is we already have some sponsors who have committed to the South Florida gala events. And these are new sponsors, we haven’t even contacted any of the previous sponsors as of today. I’m sure they’ll all be back to support this great charity.
As everyone knows, Chris and Jorge are always looking for fun and cool aviation stories but giving back is a big part of that too ! We look forward to organizing lots of successful events for Angel Flight Southeast in the coming months and years.
And if you’re looking to do events, want an awesome website or some marketing ideas that will exceed your expectations, contact me at: Alicia@AircraftGuys.com. or call us at: 786-949-4141
Angel Flight Southeast Launches New Website
2025 State Of The Private Jet Charter Industry (Part 1)
Over the past month we have been reaching out to charter, management and MRO companies. We decided to pick companies who subscribe to the free weekly Aviation Marketing Experts newsletter that is read by over 25,000 people. This is our 2025 state of the private jet charter industry Part 1.
It started with us just calling to thank people for reading the newsletter. But as we talked to some people, they were willing to talk more about their businesses.
For the Aircraft Guys stories, Jorge and Chris usually just cold call on companies in person, mostly in Florida. This time the team decided to just cold call on the phone. Generally, if we were able to get someone to the phone they usually talked for a while. If we left messages, they seemed for the most part to never return our calls.
We decided to do this as a multi part series since there are so many stories to tell and we’re still talking to people.
We begin locally in Florida. None of these are in any chronological order, just what we decided to write about for this first article.
Here are the first 3 for our series:
With our travels all over Florida somehow, we never came across this company despite it being at both the Opa-Locka and Fort Lauderdale Executive airports. The company is Presidential Aviation. And this is not a charter broker but a full Part 135 operator with a bunch of aircraft.
Jorge spoke with Yoharner Echemendia, who is the Chief Operating Officer and Director of Charter Operations. First off, he was amazed that we had not heard of them as we have been in the aviation marketing business for 45 years and they have been around for quite a while as well.
His first comment was, “I need to fire my marketing people”.
Different than quite a few Part 135 operators we spoke to, their charter business is mostly wholesale. They operate a fairly large fleet of aircraft ranging from prop to heavy jets. We definitely don’t see a lot of that either. Their aircraft are located in hangar space in FL, CA, PA NC and OH. The other surprising part was they return their flights to base, and don’t float aircraft.
Back to their marketing, he said his Google Ads were performing well. And like many other companies, they rely on word of mouth. He also said that they had never done any hangar events to promote their own business. Jorge explained it was something that we have actually helped companies do events with great success.
Here again, we’re surprised how many companies are not using some really effective marketing tools.
Now onto Arizona and PrismJet. This is a new company established in 2024. We spoke to the Sales Manager, who asked us not to use his name. He said that they are running at capacity.
This is a company who does aircraft management and maintenance. They are a Part 135 operator but utilize the excess capacity of the managed aircraft as their charter fleet. They too, do not float aircraft. Here that makes sense, since these are privately owned aircraft where the owners would not want their aircraft gone for long periods of time. They operate several Challengers and Learjets.
Now on to Chicago and DuPage Aerospace. We spoke with John Bullock, Vice President. They are a Part 135 operator with a fleet of Gulfstreams and Hawkers. Again, this is a well established company with a great track record.
Here different than above, their business is almost 100% retail, relying almost exclusively on word of mouth. He acknowledged that getting new customers outside of word of mouth was a big challenge. And when comparing sales of January 2024 to January 2025 they were about the same.
Another marketing trick that a lot of these companies have not learned is how to get their message directly to the decision makers instead of some administrative assistant. He too, acknowledged that was another problem.
He was quite candid about another challenge and that was keeping good pilots. First off, there is a bad perception of Chicago as an unsafe city. He also said that most of his experienced pilots were over 65. That of course is due to the age restrictions on commercial airline pilots. As far as training young new pilots, he said, the training costs about $30,000 each. However, once they usually get enough experience, they move to commercial airlines.
The takeaway from two of these stories is how they are not trying any new innovative marketing. It seems almost bizarre as the weekly free newsletter they subscribe to talks about all of these new techniques and the success stories. A head scratcher for sure. There’s a signup form on our homepage.
That’s it for Part 1. This was fun !
If you’re interested in chatting, give us a call at 786-949-4141 or email us at: aircraftguys@gmail.com
2025 State Of The Private Jet Charter Industry (Part 1)
