If you’ve never chartered a plane, you probably imagine something closer to a mortgage application than to buying a ticket. In practice, the PVTAIR process has fewer steps than booking a commercial seat, and the part people expect to be cagey — the price — is published on the company’s website. What follows runs in order, beginning with the quote, because that’s the step first-timers assume will be the complicated one. It generally isn’t.

The Quote Is Most of the Work

A charter quote needs four things from you: where you’re leaving from, where you’re going, when, and how many people. That’s the request. You don’t need to know the aircraft type or the runway length at your destination. The operator figures that out; it’s the job.

PVTAIR charges by the hour and is happy to show you our rates whenever you ask. At last check, an hour in one of our turboprops costs between $2,100 and $2,800, while a light jet runs from $3,500 to $5,500.

The quote comes back as one figure, and that’s what you pay. That sentence shouldn’t need saying. In this industry, it does.

Why the Number Quoted Is the Number Paid

Repositioning is the surprise most first-time charter customers learn about on the invoice. The plane has to get from wherever it’s parked to wherever you are, and on many charter quotes that leg shows up later as a separate line. Many charter websites don’t own an aircraft at all; they’re brokers sourcing a plane from someone else’s ramp, so the positioning cost is a variable they can’t see until they’ve found the plane.

Because PVTAIR operates its own aircraft, based at Felts Field, it already knows where the plane is sitting and what it costs to bring it to you before anyone writes a quote. That’s why the promise is worded the way it is: the number we quote is the number you pay, no repositioning surprise, which is less a matter of generosity than of the company quoting the flight being the same company that flies it.

Between Saying Yes and the Morning of the Flight

Once you accept the quote, the operator follows up with a few questions rather than forms to fill in. They’ll ask for each passenger’s name and approximate weight, how many bags you’re bringing, and whether anything unusual is coming along, such as a dog, a pair of skis, or a crate of parts. The weight question often catches people off guard. On a turboprop, though, the pilot calculates the aircraft’s balance rather than a computer at a hub, so the figure applies to the airplane and isn’t of interest to anyone else.

After that, you don’t have much left to do. The operator sorts out the destination airport, the fuel, and the weather watch, and if the forecast turns, you’ll hear about it, along with the options, before you’ve driven to the airport. When did a commercial itinerary last tell you the plan before you left the house?

You’ll be given a time to show up. It will be closer to departure than anything you’ve experienced at a commercial terminal, and your first instinct will be to distrust it.

Pulling Into Spokane’s Smaller Airport

Felts Field is east of downtown, along the Spokane River, and it doesn’t match the picture most of us carry around of an airport. There’s no parking garage or shuttle, and no line of people shuffling toward a body scanner. You leave the car a short walk from the building, somebody inside knows your name, and the plane is out on the ramp.

There’s no screening line for a charter departure the way there is for a commercial flight. Set that against the two hours most airports tell you to allow for a domestic departure and the first-time reaction is usually some version of “wait, that’s it?”

When you arrive, the pilot usually takes your bags out of the trunk and loads them onto the plane. After you’ve met the crew and had a brief rundown on the doors, the seatbelts, and where to find the headsets, you’re ready to leave. All of that takes less time than walking to your gate at a hub airport. This isn’t meant as a criticism of hubs, which were designed to handle hundreds of passengers at a time, something a small field like this one was never meant to do.

Dogs, Skis, and the Crate of Parts

Ask about the dog when you request the quote, and the answer is usually yes, in the cabin, on the floor beside you. Same for skis, golf bags, fishing gear, and cased hunting rifles.

The PC-12 has a cargo door built for exactly this kind of load, and the King Air B200 handles a serious pile of baggage. There are still limits. Weight and volume are real numbers on a turboprop, which is why the operator asked about bags and weights up front.

The cargo side of the business runs on the same plane. A replacement part a shut-down mill is waiting on, a load of equipment for a crew working somewhere with no big runway — the loading question is the same one your golf bag answers. Tell them what’s coming, and it gets planned, not improvised.

Where the Plane Lands Is the Real Time Savings

Jets are faster in the air. That’s the wrong measurement. A jet needs runway length, and runway length lives at bigger airports, which are farther from the places business owners in this region actually need to be. A PC-12 can use short, unpaved strips a jet can’t, so the trip ends near the meeting instead of a rental car counter.

Door to door, a first charter usually runs like this:

• You drive to Felts Field and arrive shortly before departure.
• You walk to the plane, bags get loaded, and you depart within minutes of arriving.
• You land at the small airport closest to your destination, often one with no scheduled service.
• Your car meets you on the ramp, and you drive the last few miles.

Compare that with a hub departure, a connection, a landing at the nearest large airport, and a long drive at the end. The airplane is slower on paper. The trip isn’t, because the real savings come from where the plane lands.

What the First Request Should Include

Your first request doesn’t need to be long. Include the route, the dates, and how many people are flying, and be honest about everything else that’s coming along, the dog included. It’s fine if you only know the town you’re headed to and not the airport. Tell them the town and let the operator work out which strip makes sense, since that’s their responsibility and often a part of the work they like.

If something in the reply doesn’t make sense to you, say so. Nobody at the other end assumes a first-time customer can tell a turboprop from a jet, and asking plainly about the parts you don’t understand usually leads to a better trip than agreeing to everything and then working it out beside the airplane.

The whole thing is less complicated than the commercial trip you’ve been tolerating. It was only unfamiliar, and now the path is clearer.

If there’s a trip in the next few months that ends somewhere with a small runway, send PVTAIR the route and dates and request a quote. The number that comes back is the number you’d pay, and reading it costs nothing. That makes the first step easy: ask and compare. We found a useful discussion on Reddit with several folks discussing “first time charter” etiquette, just in case you’re worried about not looking the part.