GrandView Aviation has started the process of vaccinating its pilots, owing to the company's status as an air ambulance as well as a VIP carrier. It expects to finish the jabs by mid February. In 2020, about 30 per cent of GrandView's flying was organ missions, whereas around 15 per cent is the norm. The pandemic meant that VIP demand was down.

“We don’t carry patients, we carry teams of doctors and an organ box, so they fly in VIP configuration,” explains COO Jessica Naor. “I feel that the Phenom 300 is the perfect entry level jet for a lot of new people on the market. There was a study that came out a few months ago saying that the number of private travellers that could potentially travel in the past are now doing so. We are seeing a lot more end user retail customer requests because they want to fly privately, they don’t want to be exposed to a security process where there are so many more touchpoints than there are in the private jet world.”

GrandView has introduced new bases in Boston and Denver to extend its reach. “Up to now we have been more of a regional player, but over the next couple of years it’s our intention to be a national operator,” Naor reveals. “We’ve got pretty decent coverage of the mid Atlantic over to the west, and we are going to continue going further west as well as getting in to the north west and the south east eventually. I hope that our popularity continues. I think we are going to see a big uptick this year, if we don’t have any more lockdowns and restrictions. We hope that the vaccines will start to really open up travel again; we’d like as many people to get vaccinated as possible, so that we can get back to a somewhat normal life again.”

This year the company is looking to add around four aircraft, and the same next year. It has arranged a great deal of business travel for meetings in the past, but this year has been much more about people getting to other homes, or even non-standard users: “We’ve had instances where families have paid for elderly couples to be moved from coast to coast, and the family didn’t want the couple to travel commercially. That’s not a typical charter client, but because of the coronavirus we’ve got people who are not usually private travellers finding the value in it,” Naor concludes.

The new bases in Boston and Denver supplement existing bases in Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin and Phoenix. GrandView operates 10 Phenom 300s, one Sikorsky 76-D and one Bell 407 GXi.