Why can’t my private jet get into this airport?
This can be one of the most frustrating questions when chartering an aircraft-especially if you’ve flown into an airport before!
There are a lot of factors that go into operational decisions like whether or not an aircraft can use a specific airport. In this article, I’ll list out a few of them, explain how they can affect your flight, and hopefully shed some light on why the go/no-go decisions are made the way they are.
There’s no fuel available
This can be particularly frustrating if the airport you’d like to use is on the smaller side. Aircraft use two different types of fuel, 100LL (100 octane low lead) for small piston aircraft, and Jet-A (regular jet fuel) for turboprop and jet aircraft. A small reliever airport may have a long enough runway to operate from, but if they don’t have fuel there your jet has to carry enough fuel on the way in to get back out. Sometimes this can be remedied by adding a fuel stop, but often times it makes more sense to use a larger airport that has Jet-A available.
