The first time an executive assistant is asked to arrange a private jet, the instinct is almost always to start with the aircraft — searching for cabin photos, comparing interiors, trying to identify which jet “feels” right for the principal. This is understandable, and it is also the wrong place to start. Aircraft selection is the last decision in the process, not the first, and starting there tends to produce a booking that is either overpriced, poorly matched to the actual trip, or both.
The right starting point is the mission profile, and it can be captured in four numbers and two constraints: number of passengers, amount of luggage, departure and arrival airports (with any runway length or customs constraints noted), and the actual time window — including how much flexibility genuinely exists on either end. This single piece of information, communicated clearly, does more to secure the right aircraft at the right price than any amount of independent research into cabin configurations. A broker or charter aggregator with this information can match the mission to an appropriate aircraft category — light, midsize, super-midsize, heavy, or ultra-long-range — far more precisely than a request that opens with a specific aircraft type the EA found online but that may not actually be available or necessary for the trip.
The second thing worth knowing is that private aviation pricing is not standardized the way commercial airfare is, and the quote an EA receives is not simply “the price of the jet.” It reflects aircraft positioning costs (whether the aircraft is already near the departure airport or needs to reposition), crew duty-time rules, fuel surcharges, and the specific operator’s cost structure. This is precisely why quotes from different brokers for what looks like the same trip can vary meaningfully — they may be sourcing from different operators, different aircraft, or pricing in different repositioning costs. An EA who understands this will ask the right follow-up question when a quote looks unusually high or low: what is included, and what operator is actually flying the trip.
The third thing is a discretion checklist that should be run every time, regardless of how routine the trip feels. Should crew be told the passenger’s identity before the flight, or only at boarding. Is there a preference for a particular FBO (fixed-base operator) at either airport, especially where privacy at arrival matters more than convenience. Should any details of the trip be excluded from post-flight documentation shared with the broader family office team. These questions take under a minute to ask and eliminate the majority of the discretion failures that occur in this industry — most of which happen not from malice, but from a crew or ground staff member who was simply never told the trip required extra care.
Finally, the most useful thing an EA can build over time is not aviation expertise — it is a single, trusted point of contact who already knows the principal’s preferences, discretion requirements, and typical travel patterns. Re-explaining the same context to a new broker or a generic quote-request form on every trip is where most of the friction, and most of the discretion risk, actually originates. The EAs who make this look effortless are rarely aviation experts. They are simply the ones who found a coordinator worth not having to re-brief every single time.
