The Allplane Podcast #6 - The Aviation Factory, with Carl Legein
One of the great things about aviation is that, as an industry, it attracts a fair number of entrepreneurs and dynamic personalities.
This is the case of our guest today. Carl Legein is a serial aviation entrepreneur. He is the founder of Belgium-based The Aviation Factory, which manages a portfolio of aviation businesses.
Vizion Air, for example, is a virtual carrier that operates ad-hoc services for specific collectives, like, for example, the European Parliament. But The Aviation Factory stable of brands include also an executive aviation booking marketplace, companies that provide services to passengers on the ground, specialized charter providers, logistics operators and, last but not least, a company offering flights in WW2-era aircraft such as the P-51 Mustang, “the Cadillac of the Skies”!
Ladies and Gentlement, take your seats, because we are going to speak today about aviation entrepreneurship with Carl Legein!
Download this episode on:
Apple Podcasts / iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts or Stitcher
Things we talk about in this episode:
What is The Aviation Factory
Carl’s entrepreneurship experience in the aviation industry
Flying a P-51 Mustang for fun
Marketing private flights to specific collectives
Flat-fee flying models
Resources
My article on The Points Guy about how members of the Europarliament fly
My article on CNN about flat-fee flying that we mention in the podcast
VLM, the now defunct Belgian airline that operated Antwerp to London City flights with Fokker 50s
Air Antwerp, the airline that now fulfills this role
The P-51 Mustang that you can fly with Vintage Flights, one of the firms of The Aviation Factory
Podcast Music: Five Armies by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3762-five-armies
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Episode Transcript
(please note that, although we strive to make it as close as possible to the original recording, the transcript may not be 100% accurate)
Hello and welcome to one more episode of The Allplane Podcast
One thing I like about the aviation industry is the fact that it acts like a magnet for all sorts of interesting entrepreneurial characters.
One of them is today’s guest.
Carl Legein, is the founder and CEO of The Aviation Factory and Vizion Air.
I first got in contact with Carl last year just ahead of the last European election. I was researching a piece for The Points Guy about the way members of the European Parliament fly back and forth between their constituencies and the two EU cities where the parliament is located, Brussels and Strasbourg.
It is then that I came across a small Flemish airline that, oddly enough, I had never heard about before. This airline, VIZion Air, operates a special shuttle service between Brussels and Strasbourg for those that work at the European Parliament.
But, in fact, it is much more than this.
What I stumbled upon at The Aviation Factory, is an eclectic group of companies: a virtual carrier, a private jet broker, ground handling services and even a World War 2 vintage fighter aircraft operator. In fact, any conversation with Carl, The Aviation Factory’s founder, is a whirlwind of ideas and energy
With plenty of original approaches to marketing a broad range of aviation services.
Listen to today’s episode and you will see what I mean…
Without further ado, let me introduce you to our guest today….
-Hello Carl! how are you?
-Great! Thank you! Thank you for having me in your show
-It’s a pleasure...I remember when we spoke the first time it was about Vizion air which is one of the multiple aviation businesses that you run and that we will review now in more detail. It was about an article I was doing at the time about how members of the European Parliament travel because Vizionair is one of the companies that services the European Parliament, shuttling people between Brussels and Strasbourg with one of the planes you operate...but we are going to talk about all this later. I think it’s best if I first introduce you..you are an aviation entrepreneur, based in Belgium, although I think you are currently in Italy…?
-We have the had office in Antwerp and have offices also in Spain, France, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Holland and, recently, Saudi Arabia
-Ok, that’s quite a few offices..! and the group of companies operates under the name The Aviation Factory..
-Yes, yes...The Aviation factory was the first company, it was started exactly 20 years ago, in 2000 as an air charter broker, an intermediary between operators and travel agents, touroperatros, agencies...to trace the right aircraft for every mission and help the clients make their projects successful
-And this is still part of your business…
-Yes, yes...I think, if we look at the turnover of the different business units, The Aviation Factory stands for 70% of the turnover and other initiatives take the rest.
-Because I need to tell our audience that The Aviation Factory has at least 8 separate lines of business, each operating under its own brand...There is Vizionair….am i correct to say that Vizionair is a virtual airline or you have your own AOC as well?
-No, it is correct, it is a virtual airline and we operate two aircraft ATR72 and a Saab 340 which are fully dedicated to Vizionair. Vizionair does not have its own AOC, we do not own these aircraft but we sell them exclusively in the market, ad-hoc charters for sport, government charters, like the European Parliament as you mentioned and many other missions. Vizionair is actually only working with brokers, so Aviation Factory is a client of Vizionair, if need an ATR or a Saab and conditions are ok, we will gladly rent the Vizionair aircraft, but there are 376 other brokers that are regularly booked with the aircraft of Vizionair
-So, you can book with other operators as well, you are essentially a marketplace
-Yes, this would be the main business for The Aviation Factory. All companies share the same dna, we want to be in an industry where scale is always huge and flexibility as a result of the scale may be problematic, we want to be fast, honest, we are a relatively small company in a big industry.
-You also have other lines of business..the vintage flights operators.. A P-51 Mustang WW2 fighter…
-Yes! isn't that fantastic?
-And you can fly it with a pilot, jump onboard and do some experiential flights…
-Yes, for experiential flights we have three aircraft, the P-51, which is absolutely the Cadillac of the skies, it's a full dual control aircraft where the trained pilot can invite the client and you can have an experience flying this unique aircraft, it's based in Antwerp. Besides this we have a Fouga Magister, it's a fantastic training jet, that is available for flights, and a Harvard, that is also available in Antwerp. It's absolutely fantastic , we are usually in the market of rational solutions for out clients, but with the vintage flights is all about the experience, the noise, these magnificent engine of the P-51, the sounds often reminds our customers of their youth, it's an emotional experience, a strong experience, totally different from renting an aircraft for the European Parliament! This is all about passion and spending a lot of money to fly 30min in a unique aircraft
-So it's sold for fractions of an hour, how much does it cost to fly half and hour?
-With the mustang we do half an hour flights and it’s 2,500 euros
-Ok
- 2,500 euros is quite a big amount, but this aircraft needs a lot of maintenance, it flies not so many hours, so the huge fixed cost needs to be divided by a small number flights
-I guess for most people that come onboard it’s a once in a lifetime experience
-Yes
-You have to weigh the cost in relation to this as well
-Yes
-And then you have other businesses…
-Yes, maybe I should explain this, we started 20 years ago with The Aviation Factory as a broker, a rental of helicopters and aircraft. Sometimes as a middle man you have to question yourself and whether your added value is big enough. If you don't add value your business model is under pressure and being a broker 20 years ago there was no transparent marketplace, anyone needed a broker to get a good idea of where the right aircraft could be found, nowadays with the internet, our clients wouldn't be ready to pay if the added value is not there and at The Aviation Factory, with the high volume we manage, we do 3,000 flights a year, we get very conditions with the operators and the added value is there, but i felt the need to have more control with the final product. I often felt frustrated as a middleman, the operator imposes you quite some limitations on things like catering. Some seem strange, we could not get fresh croissants onboard because the croissants had to be stored and brought from another airport and cost a fortune so we do high quality catering we decided, “why don't we make our own airline?” we’ll have more control and provided more added value if we are also in control of the look and feel, the cabin attendants...and we also had enough flights with certain types of aircraft not to rent day by day but to go to an airline - it was VLM - to say “why don't we rent your Fokker 50?” They agreed and we started Vizionair with the Fokker 50. Soon after we added a second Fokker 50 that gave us more control over the process…
-VLM was the local airline at Antwerp, they flew from Antwerp to London City…
-Exactly
-And they recently went out of business…
-Yes, actually it got restarted with different people as Air Antwerp, again flying with Fokker 50 between Antwerp and London City (LCY)
-I heard they relaunched recently, it's a sort of niche route, but I guess it makes sense because you are so close to London and I guess there is enough traffic not to go through Brussels or take the boat, that takes much longer.
-Absolutely is a historical route, been going on for more than twenty years, well, today (with Covid-19) they are not flying, but they had a great start and load factors are great, there is a big need for economical and fast transport between Antwerp and London City
-So, when you added all these services is when you launched all these new businesses? I can see Alfa Charlie Three, then you have another business called Airport Angels, that I am assuming is to provide service on the ground...
-Yes, actually what we did is starting from The Aviation Factory, find a way to get more control and added value and on the other side, also wanted to add more value towards the customer and there was this other operators called Tradefairs where The Aviation Factory only rents the tail aircraft and looks for the optimal solution, if the clients needs a 30-seater, we look for a 30 seater, itf it needs a 200-seater, we look for it, but with Tradefairs we have the possibility as a touroperator to sell seat by seat, so we are not waiting for the customer to come to us with a query, but we are actively pushing these solutions to the market. For instance there is a trade fair in Geneva, an automotive fair, we don’t wait until Ferrari calls us and asks for a 60-seater to go to Geneva...We would work with local operators and then sell by seat to everyone interested in going to Geneva to that fair.
-So you are essentially deploying capacity when there is this need, because of events and then proactively marketing these flights…
-Yes, exactly we have been doing this a lot with repatriation fights, the chance of someone asking for 250 seats from Tenerife to Brussels are there, but the chances of a single individual asking for a seat are much bigger, then we just create a flight and make sure is available on on travel agent sites and sell it. We create capacity and push it to the market and this is done by a company called Tradefairs.
-So I guess your core expertise to identify those city pairs where there is strong demand at certain periods of time, it may not be a trunk route, it may not be a connection where there is a very constant traffic flow but when there are those spikes in traffic and then you deploy this capacity on demand and sell it to individual passengers that benefit of this extra flexibility , a bit like what you do with the European Parliament, because the parliament needs to move a lot of people between Brussels and Strasbourg, that are two cities that are not particularly well connected most of the year, but at certain times you need all this capacity there, so this is when you come in and deploy all this extra capacity for a certain period of time
-Absolutely right and we do it only when there are these spikes
-This is would be the case for finals of Champions League of many football events, any moment when the demand for seats is not given the right answer, we provide supply and push it to the distribution systems
-So I can book a seat as an individual even if not a member of acollective, for example if i want to travel to ta major trade fair in Germany but I don't work for one of these big corporations, if I search online on the mainstream booking platforms may still see your flight as and individual?
-Yes, absolutely, this is possible, it's fantastic!...tracing the needs and pushing those flights into the existing online travel engines…!
-Yes, actually I am going to post an alink to the article i did for The Points Guy where I explained how this works in the case of Vizionair and the European Parliament. Then you have this other business called “Tribus”, which I am not sure I understand what it does, you say “Tribus stands for the need of like minded people to go to places and make a unique product around this need”. What does this mean in practice?
-Tribus is Latin for tribe. If a tribe needs to go somewhere. Tribus is actually the other of Tradefairs, that I explained earlier, and Tradefairs is its most popular product. Tribus is the service that creates these flights that are then pushed into the system for everyone to buy a single or multiple seats, it is a product we created
-So, same product, it just doesn't need to be a trade fair...
-Exactly, it could be for example, a group of friends that want to visit the Jaguar factory in Coventry, and 50 people can go on a fantastic day return to visit their beloved automotive brand in Coventry. It can be anything people are passionate about and people make an effort to travel for it
-And then you have cargo and logistics businesses…
-Yes, it's called Zeus, based in Ostend, it is a broker for cargo flights, it's been extremely busy lately, all the medical cargo coming from China…
-There is also another logistics business called ALS…
-Well, actually this is a partnership with a cargo logistics company, not part of a group but a partner that loves to be on our site
-So many different lines of business! I guess you constantly look for new opportunities...
-To be honest, I personally love to be constantly creating new concepts, there is nothing that gives more pleasure than create a new name, logo, website, like giving birth to a child, sometimes my colleagues have to stop me and say “Carl, we have enough ideas for this year”, it is absolutely a pleasure to create new concepts and i see most of my colleagues have the qualities to take it to the next label, market it...its team work
-Actually the name The Aviation Factory already conveys this idea...may i ask how you got into aviation? Is this something you have done your whole, life? Your whole career?
-I always worked in aviation. I started with a small company at Antwerp airport, an FBO that did fuelling, maintenance and some aircraft rental at a local scale. We ended up buying this company together with one of the clients and we created this company called Flying Group, one of the first companies in Europe to bring concept of shared ownership to the market
As a client you don't need to buy an aircraft but can buy part of it in function of the needs you have, if a company needs Cessna Citation for 100 flights a year, they could buy ⅓ of part of it, and pay also the costs, this concept now is widespread. The Flying Group is now a large business jet airline with 36 business jets all over Europe. I left after five or six years to create The Aviation Factory
-And your head office is in Antwerp…
-Yes
-Very good
-And what's the situation now, you mentioned cargo is busy i guess the other parts are more affected or are people sharing more private jets to avoid risks and all that?
-Well, with The Aviation Factory we still do flights, but a limited number, like repatriation or crew exchange, like shipping companies that need to change crews and have no other possibility of renting an aircraft. We see situations, for example, like fishermen that take the private jet...people think that private jets are always for very rich people, but actually today we have flown private jets for very important missions for normal people, like Scottish fishermen that need to get back home...like those we flew to Inverness after one week away. So those are flights for people that really need to go somewhere or need to be picked up. Also medical flights.the flights we don't do for the moment are for events, like, for example,some big company inviting many people to a large corporate event in Ibiza and for the coming months we don't expect those flights to resume. So for this part of the business is quite a rough year, although we expect to pick up eventually. For the rest, we do nearly as many flights a pre-Covid.
-The advantages of diversified businesses that balance each other
-Absolutely
-There is something i wanted to ask you about private jets: didn't you launch a flat fee flight business a while ago?
-Yes, ti was called Take Air (editor note: we got it covered back in the day, check out this article) all-you-can-fly airline we started with flights between Antwerp and Zurich that we thought was a good route...The concept was great, you paid a monthly fee and you could fly as much as you wanted on the network of this little airline, we flew a King Air 200, a 7 seater turboprop. I was a shareholder but we stepped out after a couple of months, and the main reason we left is that we were a bit naive to think we could start a new concept with very limited capital, I think we were undercapitalized, it was a great concept and if we had spend more time looking for an investor that could put one or two million it could have been a success, if you have a network of 5 or 10 city pairs, you have something great to propose. People pay 2000 a month to fly between Antwerp and Zurich but also Saint-Tropez in the summer and Sion in the Winter or Chambery...
-2000 euros?
-Yes. If we had the time to roll out the entire network, then I think it would have been great, the 2000 euros would have been not only for flight to Zurich but other places...I think the concept was fantastic, but undercapitalized
-I was curious about this concept in particular some years ago i write an article on CNN about flat fee business models for air travel (see link in Resouces), these platforms all you can fly started to proliferate but it has since faded a bit, there were a few people trying it in Europe but it did not really work, and same in the US, it hasn't really worked...this is why I wanted to get your opinion
-Yes, i read your article which i think was great…
-Thank you!
-In the US there is Surfair...there isn't an initiative in Europe that has been successful, I think the market is so competitive where there solution would be to have a hybrid membership model where this all you can fly is a sort of membership, loyalty programme, i think there is definitely a market for high end customers that are ready to fly to airports like Saint-Tropez or Sion that are not served by regular flights, there are certainly people willing to pay a premium, you see private jets flying one or two passenger paying €10-15k, there should be a market to take more passengers...I think there is market, but you need mroe flexibility where not everyone feels obliged to pay a few every month, but you can buy one seat. In the US there are some initiatives like this, where you have people that pay for the seat, but also people that mfly so many times, that they can buy membership card
-Yes, this is an interesting market, that i am keen to research further to see how it has changed since the time I looked into it and see how things have gone
-Any news project you are working on you can share I guess there is something already being cooked in the kitchen of The Aviation Factory...
-Well, i spoke with colleagues and now we are going through this challenging time, which is certainly challenging for Vizionair and The Aviation Factory, so for the time being i am focusing on the existing business, but there are certainly some ideas being cooked that i am going to be sure to share with you once they are mature.
-Definitely something worth keeping an eye on! Thanks so much, it's been a pleasure learning more about The Aviation Factory!
-Thanks to you, it was a pleasure speaking with you and looking forward for the opportunity to working together and exchange ideas
-Perfect
-So, thank you, stay safe and all the best with your projects!
-Thank you!