In our Perspectives series, Business Air News discusses private aviation experiences with industry professionals. For our April edition, Topjet's Dino Rasero talks us through the takeovers he has recently orchestrated, and the importance of creating a full-service aviation business in Italy.

“I founded Topjet in 1999 and the company currently owns four aircraft. Two months ago I bought a group of companies – the Eurofly and Aliserio Group, which had carried out some maintenance and management of our fleet. We merged operations and I became a maintenance company as well as an operator. The only company that survived the merge in terms of keeping its name was Aliserio. Aliserio is now the managing company and the maintenance company.

“What is significant about Aliserio is that it is the only Dassault Falcon authorised service centre in Italy, giving us access to a lot of customers that are flying Falcons here. We are the reference point for them in terms of maintenance. On the management side, we are now taking on a few more aircraft, which will take our fleet up to seven. The group has two hangars in northern Italy: a big one in Turin and another one in Milan.

“We are now a company that has all of the aspects of business aviation within it: charter, management and maintenance. We will be at EBACE with a booth for the first time inside the Avinode stand, where we will be able to explain the our new elements. We have become a totally different company to what we used to be. Before we were just a broker that owned aircraft, but the operations and maintenance were done by another company. Now we are a full-service company, and maybe in the future we will even have an FBO, but not at the moment.

“As the largest charter operator in Italy, we are performing three times as many pure charters as our competition. Italy is quite a strange country because there are some operators that look as though they are big, but in reality they are flying for their owners rather than for charter. Some aircraft are owned by private companies and used privately. That is quite different to what we are, as we are totally devoted to charter. We own aircraft and we manage them for commercial ops, not for an owner’s private use.

“We are focused on small cabin jets, and the Hawker 400 is our best-selling aircraft in terms of charter. We think it offers the best ratio between price and comfort. Our mission is to give access to private aviation to people who can afford it but never thought about it or considered it, and we are not focused on large cabins, except for maintenance. To buy large aircraft without having the backup of a Hawker is very heavy financially. So midsize and super light is where we focus.

“Most of our flying is within Europe, but we are also managing a Global Express for one of our customers between Miami and London. Personally, I strongly believe in the use of private aviation for short haul flights, because that is where you obtain the most of what our industry can give you, that is to say a time saving. The amount of time you save on a small flight is bigger than what you save on a long flight, if you divide by the hours you fly. If you have to do a one-hour flight and you have to be at the airport two hours before, this is double the time that you will fly! With private aviation you go and you just squeeze the time and the day. This is what I want to say to people.

“People think that private aviation is much more expensive than it actually is. They are pleasantly surprised when we tell them the price. Ultimately, we don’t sell luxury, we sell time.”