How 9/11 Has Changed Air Travel

As we approach to the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. A. I would like to reflect on how this really changed the 'course' of aviation and how we now travel by air.

I spent the first five years of my aviation career between Italy and Switzerland flying private jets as a pilot (mainly Cessna Citations and Dassault Falcon 900EX) and also got involved in aircraft sales and FBO management. A great time and learnt lots but my dream had always been to fly for the airlines. I joined my first airline in 1999 and flew both the Dornier Do328 Turboprop and was one of the first pilots in the world to qualify and operate the Dornier Do328 Jet. Often we would invite passengers to sit on the jump-seat for landing and/or just simply visit the cockpit. I remember as a teenager many times I would ask to visit the flight deck and pilots often allowed me to sit on the jump-seat for landing. Aviation was a friendly and fun environment.

Then 11th September 2001 everything changed...I remember my Boeing B737NG conversion course (Feb 2002), in particular the anti-terrorist courses the airline put me through. Cockpit doors now had to be shut, cameras installed in the galley and airport security started to be propped-up and become a hassle also for us pilots and the rest of the crew. I remember arguing with a security person at Liverpool airport because he insisted on going through my bag for fifteen minutes. I told him if I wanted to kill anybody I could do two things:

1. Crash the plane (I am the pilot)
2. Use the crash axe that every cockpit has and chop my colleague up, passengers or anyone else that came in my way

The security guy didn't know this and actually looked quite scared I said what I said.

The legacy of 9/11 is felt most in airport security. Aviation is more secure today than in 2001. But this has come at a great price in terms of passenger convenience and industry costs. However, over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of other terror attacks on aircraft and airports. Unfortunately, this is a motivating factor for terrorists because they know how much continued coverage an attack on an airport or aircraft get.

From a financial standpoint it took three years to recover the $22 billion revenue drop (6%) between 2000 and 2001. When the global financial crisis struck in 2008, 2009 revenues fell by 14% ($82 billion) to $482 billion. This was largely recovered the following year when industry revenues rose to $554 billion and airlines posted an $18 billion profit. Clearly the restructuring of the decade has left airlines leaner and more resilient in the face of crisis.

Aviation business is now growing like never before on a global scale. I am a great believer that the main driving force behind all this is the internet and new technology. It is far easier to develop new contact sitting at home on a Smart Phone, tablet, laptop or computer that it was 15 years ago. Social media is also changing the way people and companies do business. We live in a world where our phones have become our TVs and our TVs have become our radios. You get to a point where the place you have so much read about and watched on youtube needs to be visited, so you book a flight on your phone and jump on a plane.

In 1984, mathematician and former Goldman Sachs executive Richard Santulli bought a company called Executive Jet Aviation.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 developed 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 billionaire Warren Buffett, in 1995. He quickly came to the conclusion that the fractional ownership concept could become a growing trend in private aviation and in 1998, Berkshire Hathaway acquired EJA and NetJets Inc.

After 9/11 more and more people started to travel by private jet and Netjets has certainly grown because of this to over 700 aircraft worldwide.

There were 8650 private jets worldwide in 2000 and in 2010 that number had climbed to 14,150.

Terrorism has and is playing a key role in this particular aviation market growth. Almost 18,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks in 2013, a 61 percent increase from the 2012. Four terrorist groups, the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Boko Haram were responsible for two thirds of all such deaths around the globe.

The Global #Terrorism Index, produced by the London-based Institute for Economics and Peace, also found that 80 percent of terrorist attack fatalities occurred in only five countries; Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria.Worryingly, the 63 percent increase from 11,133 #terrorist deaths in 2012 to 17,958 in 2013 is the biggest year-on-year escalation since records began in 2000. Since the turn of the millennium, the number of deaths due to terrorist activates has increased fivefold, which also coincided with US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

With aircraft and airports being a target, like we recently saw at Ataturk Airport in Turkey this is encouraging more HNWIs to either charter private jets or even better own their own aircraft. Owning your own jet from a security standpoint is far better as you control everything from pilot hiring, training, maintenance, etc.

More and more companies and HNWIs are considering buying their own jet as they want to have full control of their aircraft. Both private jet charter and fractional ownership do not offer this type of level of control.

Fabrizio Poli is Managing Partner of Aircraft Trading Company Tyrus Wings. He is also an accomplished Airline Transport Pilot having flown both private Jets and for the airlines. Fabrizio is also a bestselling author and inspirational speaker & has been featured on Russia TV (RT), Social Media Examiner, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, Daily Telegraph,Billionaire.com, Wealth X, Financial Times, El Financiero and many other Media offering insight on the aviation world. Fabrizio is also aviation special correspondent for luxury magazine, Most Fabullous Magazine. Fabrizio is also considered one of the world's top 30 experts in using Linkedin for business. You can tune in weekly to Fabrizio's business Podcast Living Outside the Cube available both in video & audio. You can also follow Fabrizio's aviation videos on Tyrus Wings TV.

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