Nobody writes about this. The industry celebrates the aircraft, the operator, the principal. The person who actually determines which jet gets booked, which operator gets called, and whether the principal arrives in the right physical and mental condition to perform — that person is invisible in every conversation the private aviation industry has with itself.
This needs to change. Because the aviation decisions made by elite executive assistants and chiefs of staff are, in aggregate, worth more to the industry than the decisions made by the principals they serve.
Here is a story that is composite but not fictional. The details are drawn from conversations within the family office community and the names are not the point.
A principal was flying from London to Riyadh for a closing meeting on an acquisition that had taken fourteen months to negotiate. The counterparty was relationship-sensitive, culturally exacting, and had twice rescheduled based on what the principal’s team had interpreted as logistical issues but which, in retrospect, were tests of seriousness.
The EA had two aircraft options. A Gulfstream G650ER at a rate that came in $18,000 lower than a G700 from a different operator. Both were technically capable of the sector. Both would land at the same time.
The EA booked the G700.
Not because of the aircraft. Because of what she knew about the operator running it. Their Riyadh ground handling relationship was established and direct — they had their own handling agent at King Khalid International, not a third-party contractor. Their crew had operated the sector regularly and understood the arrival protocol for high-profile passengers at a level that a crew doing it for the first time would not.
The principal arrived rested, processed through arrival without friction, and walked into the meeting 40 minutes earlier than the agenda had required — which, given the counterparty’s cultural relationship with time and the symbolic weight of arriving early, mattered in ways that never appeared in any debrief.
The deal closed.
The $18,000 saving on the alternative aircraft would have been the most expensive economy in the transaction.
What this story is actually about
The EA who made this decision did not make it by accident. She had spent three years building a knowledge base about private aviation that most brokers would find embarrassing to be compared against. She knew the difference between operators who own their ground handling relationships and operators who outsource them. She knew which yards at which airports had the fastest customs processing for arriving GCC nationals. She knew that the G700’s wider cabin — 2.4 metres versus the G650’s 2.2 — made a measurable difference to the principal’s sleep quality on overnight sectors, which she had tracked quietly across 18 months of post-flight observations.
She knew these things because nobody had told her they were important. She had figured out, independently, that the aircraft is never just the aircraft — that private aviation is a system of interdependent decisions and that the quality of the outcome is determined by the quality of the decision-making at every node in that system.
Including, and perhaps especially, the node that the industry almost never addresses directly: the person who makes the booking.
The intelligence gap the industry is ignoring
The private aviation industry spends significant resources educating principals about aircraft. Airshow appearances. Factory tours. Bespoke demonstration flights. All of it directed at the person whose name is on the account.
Almost none of it is directed at the person who manages the account in practice.
This is a commercial error of the first order. The EA or chief of staff who develops a deep, trusted relationship with a single aviation provider — who knows the provider’s fleet, their operator relationships, their ground handling infrastructure, and their service standard across the specific routes the principal flies most frequently — is the most valuable client relationship in the industry. Not the principal. The EA.
Because the EA’s loyalty, once earned, is structural. It is embedded in the operational system of a household or family office that runs on consistency and trust. When a principal changes EA — which happens — the incoming EA inherits the established relationships. When the principal asks the EA for a recommendation, the recommendation reflects the EA’s accumulated experience, not the last marketing email that arrived in an inbox.
The aviation provider who has invested in the EA relationship has built something that outlasts individual personnel changes and survives competitive pricing pressure from brokers who are competing on rate rather than knowledge.
The practical implication
The most underprovided service in private aviation right now is a genuinely good briefing programme for executive assistants and chiefs of staff. Not a sales presentation. Not a site visit designed to be photographed. A real, substantive education in the operational decisions that determine whether a private aviation programme performs at the level the principal expects.
Aircraft type selection by mission profile. Operator evaluation criteria beyond safety ratings. Ground handling quality assessment. The metrics that distinguish a well-run charter from a well-marketed one.
The EA who receives this education becomes, immediately, a more effective operator of the principal’s aviation programme. And the provider who delivers it becomes, immediately, the provider that EA calls first.
The deal closes. The aircraft gets booked. The relationship compounds.
That is the return on investing in the person the industry has been ignoring.
Curated by: Hype Luxury
