The business aviation terminal: what you are paying for

People assume a private flight is about the aircraft. Ninety per cent of it is about the ground.

An ordinary airport is built as a conveyor: check-in, the queue for screening, the gate, boarding by groups. All of it is designed for a flow of people and it demands a time buffer at both ends. A business aviation terminal is built around one person who has arrived and wants to fly.

What that means in practice:

1. A separate entrance; the car drives almost up to the steps.

2. Formalities take minutes. You arrive shortly before departure instead of allowing two hours.

3. Baggage never enters the common system.

4. Border and customs control are handled away from the main flow.

5. At the destination the same arrangement runs in reverse.

The time saved in private aviation comes from the absence of ground procedures. On a short route the door-to-door difference works out larger than the difference in flying time.

Hence the practical rule for costing a business trip: count the full door-to-door time. Four hours on a scheduled flight turn into seven or eight once you add the drive to the hub, the buffer for screening and the wait at the baggage belt. An hour and a half on a private aircraft stays two.

In Moscow it works like this: at Sheremetyevo, Vnukovo and Domodedovo the runway is shared with the scheduled flights, while the business aviation terminal stands separately. The passenger arrives thirty minutes before departure, the formalities take ten to fifteen minutes, and there is no limit on baggage. An urgent flight within Russia is arranged in four hours.

I look at those thirty minutes from the operator's side. The crew has its own entrance to a business aviation terminal, with customs and passport control, and the crew is on site two hours before departure: the medical check before every flight and the preparation of the aircraft take about that long. In business aviation the crew is usually assigned to a particular aircraft and a particular client. The passenger's thirty minutes rest on those two hours.

And the other side of it, which nobody warns you about: a business aviation terminal is not present at every airport. If your destination has none, you land into the common flow and part of the advantage disappears. This is something to establish in advance, at the booking stage.

Alexander Filimonov — business aviation: sourcing, acquisition and entry into service of aircraft.

We confirm the presence of a terminal and the handling arrangement for every route in advance: https://grok.flights/go/tc-terminal